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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.
Prompt to Page Ep. 46: Leatha Kendrick
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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 Leatha Kendrick.
Author of five poetry collections, Leatha Kendrick received Transylvania University's 2025 Judy Gaines Young Award, recognizing exceptional works by Appalachian authors. Leatha grew up on a southern Kentucky farm. Her adult life was spent in Eastern Kentucky where she and her husband raised three daughters.
Kendrick began writing seriously in midlife and found her first community of writers at the Appalachian Writers Workshop. She received her MFA in poetry at the age of 45 from Vermont College of Fine Arts. [00:01:00] Recent poems and essays appear in anthologies such as Troublesome Rising: A Thousand Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky and in journals including Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, and Hood of Bone Review.
Welcome Leatha, and thanks for joining us.
Leatha: Thank you, Carrie. It is so great to be here. I've been loving listening to your podcast and I'm always taking notes and getting inspired for new ways to jumpstart my own writing, so I'm very, very happy to be here.
Carrie: Excellent. Well, thank you and we're glad to have you here too.
So you mentioned in your bio that you got your MFA when you were 45.
Leatha: Yes.
Carrie: And you're certainly not the first person we've had on the podcast who has done so in midlife, but I just wondered for any listeners out there who might be considering doing that, would you have any advice for them?
Leatha: I would say that if it is something that you feel [00:02:00] called to do, do it.
It was hard for me to make that leap. And, and it really, I was just working on a poem this morning that I'm drafting to try to capture that moment of knowing that I wanted to do this.
It was actually Betsy Sholl at the Appalachian Writers Workshop who said to me, kind of in passing, one of the earliest times I was there, you should go get an MFA.
And for me, I wanted the discipline. I wanted the challenge, and I wanted the writing community. I have a wonderful writing community here, but to be able to expand that community was just very attractive to me. And I did a low residency program.
I had children in elementary school and high school, I guess one. And, you know, they were like really enthused and inspired. They're, you know, I have three daughters. So for them to see that [00:03:00] if you are a, a woman and a mother, you can go out and find something that you haven't quite done yet and commit yourself to it.
Carrie: Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Absolutely. So that was good for everyone.
Leatha: Yeah.
Carrie: So I had the pleasure of hearing you read recently this spring at the Carnegie Center, and I think if my memory is correct, I seem to remember you saying that you like to sometimes write in public places like the library.
Leatha: Yes. Yes.
Carrie: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Leatha: Yes. When I first started writing, I actually didn't have a place in our house, and we had a walk-in closet that had a window, and I put a little desk under the window. So I was literally writing in the closet, and I was, I felt this need to be very contained and almost hidden away.
And the idea of writing in a public place was like, okay, no, not for me. But, one of the things I wanted to talk about today is the idea of creativity as a habit. [00:04:00]
And for me, making these appointments with myself to go to the library, for, say, I commit to doing a half an hour, but I always end up staying one to two hours and just taking only what I need to have to write, was a way to recommit in a life that's busier than I would've thought it would be at this point.
Everything else falls away for me. And I think that's what other people experience writing in public. You have this kind of solitude there and other people are doing the same thing at tables and chairs all around you. And there's a sense of community in that too.
So I love the fact that libraries are gathering places for readers and writers, and people, curious people, who wanna know things and children who are excited about everything.
So.
Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah, that's one of the things, one of the many things [00:05:00] I enjoy about working in a public library.
Leatha: Yes, yes.
Carrie: You know, many libraries too have quiet rooms or quiet spaces. So if you do find yourself kind of bothered by noise or the excited children that might be in the space, you can find a quiet place too.
Leatha: Yes. Those are wonderful. And my public library is the Beaumont Public Library. And, they've remodeled to have, I think, kind of more communal spaces and there's only, there are fewer small rooms now. So at first I thought, oh, will I be able to do this?
And then I found when I sat down and got started, there's not all the things around you in your regular space that are reminding you to pay that bill or do whatever.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. I know that has been my own experience as well. I also, when I go somewhere to write, I, [00:06:00] I don't have a laptop, so I'm not bringing my computer, so I'm not
distracted by all of the things that we can get distracted by now, and that helps too.
Leatha: I turn off the Wi-Fi when I go to the library so that I can't be trying to go look something up real quick or anything, and I just have what's there on the screen.
Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that's also good advice. So, what role do prompts play in your writing process?
Has that changed over time?
Leatha: It has changed somewhat over time, but prompts have always played a big role in my writing because I think writing is discovery and I love this quote from Frost where he says, "it's but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for last."
No surprise for the writer. No surprise for the reader. [00:07:00] I want this element of surprise and to have a prompt that will make me, you know, momentarily panic and go, I can't do this. I have no idea what I'm gonna say, you know, is the perfect way to get me over that threshold and into a place of not just writing what I already know, but discovering something that I don't already know.
And, I also like the idea, I taught freshman comp at UK back in the seventies when I was in grad school. And one of the things that was just coming on then was the whole idea of freewriting. And I taught what was then an experimental comp class in personal writing instead of those assigned essays.
And I used Ken McCrory's, Telling Writing, and Ken McCrory was one of the first places that I saw freewriting, you know, where you set the timer and you just say whatever comes.
And it's really funny [00:08:00] because my neighbor down here came up and introduced herself to me and said, you were my freshman comp teacher and she was in that experimental class and she was telling
Carrie: Oh really?
Leatha: How freaked out she was. And she and her friend took it together and were like, we can't do this, we don't wanna do this. But then it turned out, you know, to be really good. So, I've had that mindset now for 50 years, about writing to just.
First of all, you get through a lot of stuff and then suddenly some image pops up that you're like, where did that come from? And you just go with it. So between those two things, those are kind of central to the teaching that I have done in all genres. Do some freewriting at the beginning of class.
Always try to write a little bit in class and share something that's fresh, and you know, that we have a chance to respond to and say, oh, this is really something. Let's, you know, go with that. Let's see where it goes. You know, so prompts for me have been a rich source [00:09:00] of generation, generative writing.
Carrie: Yeah. Would you like to share your prompt?
Leatha: I am going to go back. Yes, I would very much, and I'm gonna go to the prompt that I immediately knew I wanted to share, and then I listened to George Ella's podcast with you and she was talking about my prompt and it was not my prompt, but it's Rita Dove's, and I thought, well, shoot.
And then her prompt was different because she's adapted it for when she wrote Many Storied House. Well, here's the original prompt and it came from The Practice of Poetry, a book that came out in the nineties, I think, and it's Rita Dove's prompt Your Mother's Kitchen. And here's how Rita describes it.
Write a poem about your mother's kitchen. It helps if you actually draw the kitchen first with crayons. Put the oven in it and also [00:10:00] something green and something dead. You are not in this poem, but some female relation--aunt, sister, close friend--must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
So that's a very specific, you know, arbitrary set of conditions, which is what makes a prompt, good prompt, for generative writing. And to have to put something green in and something dead in and the oven, and to be conscious of keeping yourself out of the picture. And having someone walk in.
Those are rich things, but the real thing that used to make my students groan was me handing out paper and crayons. [Both laugh]
They're like, well, we're not really gonna do this, are we? Because nobody thinks they can draw except the people who know they can draw.
Carrie: [Laughter] Right.
Leatha: And so, you know, you have to say it's not about the drawing.
It's about what [00:11:00] happens between your brain and your hand and your whole body when you start to draw and the things that you remember that you wouldn't remember. So the first time I did this exercise, I found myself suddenly drawing these what looked like eyes all over the cabinets in my mother's kitchen. My mother remodeled our kitchen with knotty pine.
And so here was this image of these watching eyes, you know, that, that I don't think I would've remembered if I hadn't been trying to draw the kitchen.
And then something green. Mother had a, she loved plants and there was a planter in, under the cabinets in the pass through between the kitchen and the dining area.
And there were mother-in-law tongues, those spiky plants. And what a perfect, [00:12:00] you know, object, image. And then of course the oven was her pride and joy. She had a double oven, stainless steel built in there. And all this, you know, this was back in the fifties. And so here, all of a sudden I had what turned out to be a poem in my first collection, called Knotty Pine.
And here's the first few lines of it. Of course, many drafts and lots of
cutting later. Knotty Pine. "Distressed is what they call the wood, knotty pine, streaked, cracked, shellacked, swirling eyes that watched her all the time. The beer can hidden in the slide of books, the smoke tracing its white line upward from the ashtray, mingling with the steam from the boiling pot."
So that's the first sentence. It's much. You get to a place, a visceral, a visceral place where a lot of heavy [00:13:00] lifting is done by the objects, that you have noticed and drawn.
Carrie: Yeah. That's interesting that you drew those before you consciously remembered
Leatha: Yeah.
Carrie: them, and how resonant those images were in your poem.
Leatha: Well, one of the things that, early on, George Ella was one of my first good friends, as a writer. My writing mentor in a way, although we're, we're the same age actually, she gave me this little post-it note that said, trust the process. And that is a mantra for me.
When you do something that disengages your rational mind a bit, you are in the midst of a process where unsaid things can find a way onto the page in a way that isn't couched in the language of, I felt, I [00:14:00] did, I saw, but in the language of the things of this world, you know?
Carrie: Right.
Leatha: So that's why I keep returning to that prompt. And I've used it many different ways.
I've taught classes like writing through crisis. You can use the drawing to return to a moment of realization. You have to be careful in using a prompt like this because it can take you to a place you're not ready to go. And you always need to say, okay, not doing that yet. [Laughter] But it can also help you.
It's like the poem I was drafting today. I was going back through old files and I saw that I had used that in a class. I always draw with my classes and I had made a folder with the drawing and some scribbling and stuff. 'cause what you do, you draw and then you turn the paper over and just start writing anything that comes to mind.
You can also, as you're drawing, go ahead and label the drawing. I have that close by, [00:15:00] but you can label things in the drawing and there's some rich language that can come out there as well. So, you know, I feel that my, for me drawing, I'm, I love to draw as a hobby. I'm not, you know, an artist, but it's just a way to
see the world more deeply. And I love taking photographs for the same reason. So those things are all part of writing.
Carrie: Yeah. And I have read people say that everyone should be drawing that, you know, that this is something that we humans did in our earliest forms.
It's just something that we're naturally inclined to do, and helps us, as you point out, think in different ways.
Leatha: Yes, yes. I remember, I think one of the first times I encountered your poetry, there was that exhibit at the Lyric Theate with the, I can't remember the other, the visual artist's name with, [00:16:00] cakes and pies, not mistakes.
Carrie: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. Lori Larusso.
Leatha: And that, it was so powerful to me to have the two together, you know? And of course, now it gets more and more common and the, the really exciting work that you, yourself are doing as a poet now is a hybrid form, you know, that has the texture of another art.
And craft of embroidery and everything.
Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you.
Leatha: Yeah.
Carrie: And you mentioned that successful prompts are arbitrary or have an arbitrary element, and I think that is true too. Why do you think that is?
Leatha: Well, I think it is the same basic thing that makes writing in form, sometimes allowing, sometimes sparking work that couldn't otherwise happen.
You have to reach for something that didn't automatically come to you. So reaching for what is there that's green, what is there in that room that's [00:17:00] dead. So, you know, you have to imagine something that you wouldn't necessarily have just in your normal. We tell ourselves these stories about our lives and they end up in our poems, but the thing about the stories is they become static.
We think we've understood it, and unless we can get under that story or open that story up, we don't really reach what the story's trying to bring us.
And I think with an arbitrary prompt, especially something very specific and physical, either an object or an action or an element of scenery, those things take us out of the story we've already told ourselves.
The same thing for if you're writing in a form and you have the imperative of a certain line length and the idea of at least some sort of use of sound [00:18:00] to hold, you know, to carry the poem. You've added elements that distract you from the story you already thought you knew and make you reach a little bit.
Carrie: Yeah, definitely. And I also wanted to point out for listeners that Silas House had a very similar prompt, I don't know if you listened to that one, but his was about a kitchen. And it was very, it was also very similar to George Ella's in the way that he kind of mapped it out.
Leatha: Right.
Carrie: I think, you know, if you're a fiction or a prose writer, listening to that one might be a good way of thinking more, you know, more broadly about the prompt. So they would be good, these three episodes would be good, you know, pairings, I guess.
Leatha: Right. I mean. I love what George Ella did in Many Storied House because she went room by room and kind of mapped this.
And there's different emphases in each one of [00:19:00] those podcasts about how you can go about using this prompt.
Carrie: Do you have any final writing tips you'd like to give our listeners?
Leatha: I think that the idea of creativity as a habit and of knowing that, I think it was William Stafford that said something like, writers don't write because they have something to say, but because they found a means to say things they didn't know that they had to say yet.
So, to exercise your creativity is to keep it active and alive. You have to get up and walk to the library and then something can happen. It's not that this thing is bursting to happen in you all the time, but that if you go and you sit down and you make a space for it, it comes. Then something I've heard writers say over and over again, which for me is also central, is community, is [00:20:00] having, like, the Appalachian Writers Workshop, the writer's group that I still am in, that we started there in 1989.
I mean, that's a long term. It's a lifetime. It's a life's work. And I think about. I think it was Katherine Paterson that said, practice an art for the love of it, and it will outlast almost anything but breath.
Leatha: So that's what I would say. Keep practicing.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That's, well, that's a very inspiring note to end on.
So thank you for sharing that and for joining us.
Leatha: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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.org. Our [00:21:00] music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.
Find out more about Archipelago: Songs from Quarantine Volumes One and Two at the links on our podcast website.