April brings the A to Z Writing / Blogging Challenge.
This year,in Apri, I will be posting 26 posts, one for each letter of the alphabet. The topic “Permission to Write” will be the theme to guide me through the 26 posts.
This grouping of posts will, I hope, give you permission to write about anything, and all things. These will be enabling permissions rather than constraining prompts. Sometimes, as 21st Century woman, I find so many other tasks, to dos, and ought to dos, that I do not prioritize my writing with great importance. I suspect I am not the only person to put my needs, especially when it comes to writing, far lower on my to do list than it deserves. Far lower than I deserve.
Women need access to other women’s thoughts, writings, knowledge, and wisdom. If we do not write these down, record them, and at least attempt to preserve them in some fashion, then we are ill-serving our daughters, nieces, and all future women to repeat mistakes we made and from which they will not be able learn.
I am sharing what I believe are carefully crafted elicitation tools. Prompts , in their simplest form, can poke you and produce an answer to a question. An elicitation tool, named and used by social scientists, walks with you down a path into a private memory garden filled with reference to images, emotions, and even scents that are connected to experiences from your life.
This is the difference between, “When was your grandmother born?” and “Tell me about the first memories you have of your grandmother’s kitchen, porch, or garden.”
We have to ask the right type of question if we want to tell a nuanced story.
The Central web page for the challenge can be found here. However, this site is older, insecure, http web protocol and and not the secure https protocol that all online readers should look for when opening or reading a site.
The listing of the participating sites can be found here in this google doc.
To participate in the A to Z Challenge, you will need to register here. Why? So you can read and draw inspiration from other participants’ writings.
Enjoy, think, write!