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A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts—exercises that can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, a novelist, essayist, or poet, you’ll find ideas and advice to motivate you to keep writing. A partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
PtoP Ep 36 White edit 1
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Deirdre White.
Deidre is a Lexington, Kentucky native, a University of Kentucky MFA graduate, and an aspiring Affrilachian poet. She received the 2022 Farquhar Award for Poetry for "Meihua", the Patricia and William Stacey Endowed Fellowship for Distinguished Honors in English, The William Hugh Jansen Fiction Award in the Art of Storytelling Folklore for "Woodstock," the 2023 winner of the Broadside Poetry Contest for "When They Come," and the 2023 winner of the Master of Fine [00:01:00] Arts in Creative Writing Nonfiction Award for her contemporary piece, "Duck."
She was also the keynote speaker for the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate Commencement. Her work engages the tradition of Affrilachian writing and explores the intricate dynamics of Black womanhood with an eye to connections of the past to present. Welcome and thanks so much for joining us.
Deidra: Thank you for having me.
I'm so excited to be here.
Carrie: And congratulations on graduating from the University of Kentucky with your Master of Fine Arts.
Deidra: At my age it was not an easy task, so thank you.
Carrie: Since you bring up your age, I read there was a really nice article about you in the UK Alumni Magazine that talked about you going back to school after working for a while.
Deidra: Uh huh.
Carrie: And you originally planned to get a business degree. [00:02:00] So a Master of Fine Arts is very different. Can you tell us what, how you made that switch?
Deidra: She is going to kill me because she keeps telling me to stop telling people that it was all hair, but it really was I had a beautiful professor Her name is Tammy Ramsey, and she taught at BCTC Lawrenceburg. And I was living in Frankfort at the time and being a non traditional student I think I went back to school around 37 or 38 years old.
I figured I'd start at a community college because I hadn't been to school in 18 years or 20 years. So I took her English class, her English 101, 102, and I think maybe a 104, but she keeps me after class, and she said, what are you majoring in? And I said, business. And at the time I had been at a factory, Johnson Controls in Georgetown, the automotive plant that makes interiors for Toyota.
I had been there for almost 18 years and I was part time supervising. And I knew if I got a degree that I could be a manager [00:03:00] and make more money. And I also had started a cleaning company, a janitorial service in 2014. And I've been doing that for a few years and I wanted to learn the aspects of business to help grow my company.
So it was just logical that I would get a business degree. And when I told her everything I just told you, she said, Oh, that's too bad. And I'm like, what? I'm talking about making hundreds of thousands of dollars here. And she said, "No, no, there's nothing wrong with it. I just thought you were an English major."
And I thought she was insane. I laughed at her. She told me why and I left. You know, she told me why that my writing was good. And I left her classroom. And my memories like a Rolodex came back. And it was me with my typewriter, me with my binder of stories that I wrote only for me, me begging my mom to stay at the public library until it closed.
Just a bunch of memories that I had suppressed. And I was like, am I supposed to be a writer? So I took a year off because I'm too old to be changing my major. [00:04:00] And I went to the Carnegie Center, took all the free classes I could. And I met Crystal Wilkinson and Dr. Damaris Hill there, and they said, We teach at UK.
And I was like, Well, yeah, I'm going to UK. So I transferred to UK and the rest is history and I fell in love with it. And I realized from taking the classes that not only did I have this innate ability to be, to write, it was just kind of a piece of who I was and who I've always been. I kind of realized I've been always writing stories in my head.
I think a lot of us do that. You know, we observe, we're observers. Writers are natural observers to me. It's not so much that we engage in society, but we sit back and watch it and question it and try to answer those questions in our heart, you know, and that's just kind of how that came about. And then I met, you know, Professor Frank X
walker and the rest was history after that.
Carrie: Well, that's, that's great. And I'm just curious for other people [00:05:00] who maybe are, might be considering either going back to school or getting their MFA. What to you was the most valuable aspect of that experience?
Deidra: Being, having the freedom to play And having a professional look at your work.
There's one thing about writing. You need somebody to bounce your ideas off of sometimes or somebody to say, Hey, you know, will you take a look at this and see if it resonates and being able to have Crystal Wilkinson, Dr. Damaris Hill, Dr. Shawna Morgan, Frank X walker, like MF. UK's, MFA program is a powerhouse.
Carrie: Mm-Hmm. ,
Deidra: I don't know how else to describe it. The, the, the literary brains that you have access to in that program that not only give you valuable feedback on your work, but they also can help guide your career and what steps you need to take next. It's, it's invaluable. It's invaluable. So that, that is one thing about being in an MFA program that [00:06:00] if you're, you're writing alone, you know, this is something that you're doing on the side because most writers have full time jobs.
It's not a wealthy industry. It's hard to get wealthy in it. So we usually have full time jobs, but just being able to have great literary minds to bounce your work off of, I think is the most valuable and important aspect of getting an MFA.
Carrie: And was there anything you wish someone had told you before you got your MFA?
Deidra: To not pigeonhole myself. When I went into the MFA program, of course they make you choose a genre. And I had been writing a lot of poetry with Writing What Is. LeTonia Johnson and Tanya Torp have a beautiful writing circle for women and femmes through the Carnegie Center. And I had been writing a lot of poetry with that writing group.
And so when I went into the MFA, I thought I was a poet. I'm a poet. I write poetry. This is what I do. But even though I had already won all these awards in fiction [00:07:00] and other genres, I still saw myself as just a poet. And it wasn't until I had a conversation with professor Frank X walker that he was like, where are these stories?
And I was like, well, I'm a poet. And he was like, You can write whatever you want. And it's once I stopped putting those blinders on and putting myself in this box that I realized how vast the language of writing is and how many different avenues I can take and one oftentimes inspires the other. You know, I can be writing a story about my father because I'm working on a memoir, a manuscript, and it'll inspire a poem.
And I'll pull a piece of that language from that nonfiction and write a whole poem about it. So, don't pigeonhole yourself. If you think you're only a fiction writer, you're only a nonfiction memoirist, or you're only a poet, don't do that. You know, understand that if you can do one, there's a huge [00:08:00] possibility that you're great in all three.
It just takes exercising that muscle, you know, if that makes any sense.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's great advice. And you have worked with young people recently. You were the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate commencement speaker. Or, is that correct? Commencement speaker or keynote speaker?
Deidra: I was
the keynote speaker, yeah. Yeah. And she was the Poet Laureate.
Carrie: And then you also, taught a workshop at Camp Carnegie for 6th to 8th graders. So what do you enjoy most about working with young people?
Deidra: The way that they love that there are no rules. Even when there's rules, they're going to find a way to bend them in and make them more malleable to their will.
They're so good at just letting their imagination just fly. And they create, I taught at UK as a graduate instructor, and I had two students in [00:09:00] my 207 poetry workshop class that created a whole nother format of writing. And I had to take it to Professor Walker, like, how do they, how do they copyright this?
They've created this form that nobody's done before, and he's like tell them they have to get it published, and that's what they went and did. They make their own rules. And, and working with them, it's like watching a light bulb that never shuts off. They are brilliant.
So often, throughout the day, that, I don't, I don't know how to put it into words, which is crazy because I'm a writer, but there's something about the, the child mind that has no deny in it. It has no, you can't, you're not welcome here and they will take their writing and their work and their words into those depths that, that we haven't even thought to journey there.
And it's beautiful to see, and I love watching them [00:10:00] play on the page. We played a game at Camp Carnegie called Stop Sign Poetry, Street Sign Poetry, and we took them on a three block walk, and they could only write down words that they saw on signs, or on bumper stickers, and then those were the only words that they can use to create a poem.
And the things that they produce just from that one exercise, It was far beyond anything that I thought that they would be capable of coming up with. It's, uh, it's, children are just great. Their minds are great. I love how they work.
Carrie: That sounds like a great exercise to try. There's our first prompt for the episode.
So speaking of prompts, do you tend to use prompts in your writing process?
Deidra: I do.
I'm really, really big on ekphrastic and I don't know if you would consider this a prompt, but I will go and walk through the UK museum, art [00:11:00] museum, or I'll go down a rabbit hole on a painter or, and I'll look at what it is that they're creating and it'll prompt me to write something.
Even sometimes just the physique of the focus of a painting, how they're standing, and then I might even try to recreate the pose and see what my body's saying. One of the prompts I use in my classes is, who owes you an apology? That's usually one that really gets the juices flowing. Or I'll wake up in the morning and I'll say, what do I need to say to me today?
And it'll just be a question that's in my mind all day. The hardest part for me is who I'm speaking to, who is my audience when I'm sitting down to write something. And when I'm stuck, the best thing that I can do is say, write the poem that you need to read. Write the poem that would speak to you now in this moment, or the poem you needed at nine, or the poem that you needed to [00:12:00] read at fifteen.
Understanding your audience and who you're writing to is often a really good way to get the juices flowing.
Carrie: Yeah, I like that idea of narrowing it down even to yourself at a certain point in time. Why do you think it's so important to know who your audience is?
Deidra: It controls so much of how you put things on the page, your diction, your word choice, whether you're using dialect and vernacular or not.
How open and vulnerable you're going to be on the page depends on who you're speaking to. If you're thinking about critics and the naysayers, if you're thinking about what happens if my mom reads this, you're stifling yourself creatively. So understanding your audience and who you're writing to and making sure that it is an audience that you're willing to be vulnerable with, it catapults your writing in the most beautiful way.
Carrie: [00:13:00] So, you've given us a few prompts already, were those the prompts? I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss your, do you have another prompt you want to talk about?
Deidra: We talked about ekphrastic writing, music. I am a person that my neurodivergent brain, I have to have my lo fi going in the back or I have to have my jazz going in the back.
And one, another prompt that I used with my students that they loved was, think of that song. That puts you in a certain mood, the song you listen to when you're sad that you feel heard in, or the song that always pumps you up that you might listen to in the morning to get your day going. And I'll say write the next verse, because I believe all music is poetry, whether it's rap, whether it's R& B, whether it's country, when you put those words on the page and pull the production of the music out, it's always poetry.
So using songs to, to prompt a poem is, is always another, a good way to, to get the juices flowing as well.
Carrie: And just out of [00:14:00] curiosity, cause you mentioned lo fi music. So do you, are you able to listen to music that has lyrics when you're writing? Or do you, or do you have to listen to like, instrumental music.
Deidra: I use a lot of instrumental if I'm not the only person in the room, but if it's just me, neurodivergence and ADHD, your brain wants to be doing multiple things at one time or it gets bored. So if I have something playing lo fi, I had to go down this rabbit hole because I was like, why does lo fi work so well?
And it's because they have house sounds in the background. You might hear a sink running a door closing. It's very subtle, but it's not just the music that you're hearing on the track, which helps you settle into whatever it is you want to focus on. So when I have those extra noises in the background, it helps me narrow in and focus.
Don't ask me why, it just works. So, when I have lyrics, it doesn't, it doesn't bother me at [00:15:00] all. It doesn't bother me at all.
Carrie: Yeah, that's really interesting. I didn't know that about lo fi music and having the other noises in the background. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm definitely someone I can't have, I can have lyrics if it's not in English.
Like,
Deidra: It's not distracting you?
Carrie: Yeah, because it's not distracting me, but yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't do that myself. But, um, I'm always envious of people who can.
Deidra: Yeah, I, I, I don't know why it works for me, but, but it does. But I've learned from teaching classes that most people cannot have the lyrics.
So I'll use, I'll use jazz and also use it to introduce the students into new types of genres of music, you know?
Carrie: Yes.
Yeah. You mentioned that you're writing a memoir as well as poetry. Does your use of prompts vary between when you're writing those different genres?
Deidra: My memoir is about my father's life.[00:16:00]
And he's 81, born in 1943. And everything that I'm writing with him is prompted by conversations that we're having. So I will sit down, I'll have a list of questions and He'll get to talking. We've taken a couple of trips to Newport, Kentucky, where his descendants are from. Well, some of his descendants are from and talk to their children, and I'll just turn on the camera and I'll just let them have a conversation.
And as they're speaking, I'll write that down, like, hmm that's interesting, hmm that's interesting. And then that, flows into how I'm creating the memoir, just from these conversations we're having. I think a lot of if I'm if I'm asking him a question or prompting him to talk about something, it's usually how it fits into American history because I'm learning now
that I can't separate his story from the history of this country because one [00:17:00] affects the other and vice versa. So I'll say, well, then, you know, in, in 1960, you know, JFK, what were you all doing then? What was happening then on the farm, you know, and that might prompt him to go into a long, you know, dialogue with me about that.
But for the most part, it's just us sitting down. Talking and having these conversations and he's giving me this story in chronological order.
Carrie: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because our guest last month was Silas House and you know, he has, I don't know if you know about it, but he has created a curriculum for
teachers to use in schools with their students, and it's an oral history curriculum. So, that really ties in.
Deidra: Yeah, it's so important. I don't think we understand, you know, the daily hustle and bustle of life, but we're losing our history. And with the banning in books and with the suppression of suppression of American history in the [00:18:00] schools, the proper American history that needs to be told.
It's important to capture these stories now. You know, I'm so glad that I, that I embarked on this journey and I'm so glad that Professor Frank Walker prompted me to do it because I'm learning so much, not only about the history of my family and the people that I come from and the land that we lived on.
I'm learning about me. And, I think it's very true that, If you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. And so I think everybody, if you have a nana, a grandpa, you know, somebody that's getting up there in age, sit down and talk to them. Don't guide them. Just let them tell you their story.
It's so important to capture those moments right now. I'm even learning about farming. I started a garden because we're writing this memoir together because I'm learning all these farming techniques because he grew up on a farm And I [00:19:00] mean I've eaten out of my garden all summer. I've grown that much stuff And it just, I don't know, it just, it infuses your life with so much more than you think it will.
It's not all about history, it affects us in the present day too.
Carrie: Yeah, wow, very cool. Do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners?
Deidra: Vulnerability. I think I spoke a little bit about it earlier. I got to speak to, oh God, she's going to kill me. And I have her book Unshuttered back there, right back there.
Her name is Patricia, and hopefully her last name will come to me. She just put out a great poetry book called Unshuttered, and I don't know why I'm blanking on her names. But I got to meet her at, Centre College, and she said, "Write the thing that gives you shame." And I thought she was insane for saying that.
Who wants to write, who wants to put their shame on the page and then put it out there for the world? But that's where you change, not only yourself, but other [00:20:00] people. My students now, I, I'm a humanities instructor at BCTC, and my students are turning in a personal narrative. And I had a student email me, "thank you for assigning this essay.
I feel better." Writing is cathartic, and it's not even so much for the people that will take in your words, but it's also for you. So if you're not being authentic, and you're not being vulnerable on the page, you're doing yourself a great disservice and your audience because there's somebody out there that needs to hear that poem or needs to read that short story.
They need it with everything in them. When I applied to the MFA program, I talked about in my statement of purpose, how these writers, when my mom was dying and my dad was gone, they were the friends in my head. They were the people that I talked to every day and the people that I trusted. And if you're not being authentic with your work [00:21:00] and you're not being vulnerable and open up and writing your shame, as Patricia would say, then you're, you're doing yourself a great disservice.
I was listening to a lecture once and they were talking about the power of authenticity and how it's 10 times more powerful than the feeling of love. Just being exactly who you are in your own skin and being honest with your voice. It's, it's more powerful than love. So I would, I would leave people with that.
Carrie: Wow. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. You've given us so many different prompt ideas and we really
appreciate you being here.
Deidra: Thank you so much for having me. I, I really enjoyed it.
Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex. [00:22:00] org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.
Find out more about Archipelago, Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website.