For our fifth episode, we talk to Martha Greenwald, the director of the WhoWeLost and WhoWeLostKY projects. Martha offers suggestions for writing memories about loved ones and provides a writing prompt suitable for all genres and topics that encourages writers to slow down and let their ideas develop.
Show Notes
For our fifth episode, we talk to Martha Greenwald, the director of the WhoWeLost and WhoWeLostKY projects. The WhoWeLost projects serve as "a sheltering place for remembrance" for victims of COVID-19. Martha offers suggestions for writing memories about loved ones and explains how you can share your stories on the WhoWeLost websites.
She also provides a writing prompt suitable for all genres and topics that encourages writers to slow down and let their ideas develop. As she notes, "I've found some people really need to be slow and take their time with [writing]. So this is geared toward that idea that the slowness is okay."
About Our GuestMartha Greenwald is the Founding Director, creator, and curator of the WhoWeLost and WhoWeLostKY projects. She is the author of the poetry collection Other Prohibited Items, which won the Mississippi Review Prize for Poetry. In 2020, she was the first prize winner of the Yeats Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Nurture, Slate, Best New Poets, The Threepenny Review, and numerous other journals.
She has been both a Wallace Stegner and Pearl Hogrefe Fellow, has received fellowships from the Kentucky and North Carolina Arts Councils, and been supported by Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. She taught creative writing, literature, and ESL at the high school and college level for nearly twenty years. She's teaching a new class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and collaborating on a radio series with WUKY 91.3 that gives a voice to stories from the WhoWeLost websites.
Join the Prompt to Page Writing Group Tuesday, Jan. 25, 6:00 PM
Spend time working on this month’s Prompt to Page podcast writing prompts, get feedback, and share writing tips with a community of other writers. Open to all writing levels.
Register for Remembering and Writing About Our Loved Ones
Part 1: Monday, Jan. 24, 6:00 PM
Writing is a healthy way to cope with grief, but it's often hard to get started. In part one of this class, taught by the director of The WhoWeLost Project, we will learn how to write short remembrances of our loved ones. We will focus on the stories and details of their lives, whether they died due to the pandemic or other causes. All level writers welcome.
In the second part of Remembering and Writing About Our Loved Ones, you'll have the chance to share and receive feedback on the writing you began in part one.
We’d love to see what you’re writing! Submit a response to the episode prompt for a chance to have it read on a future episode of the podcast.
What is Prompt to Page?
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 5
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[00:00:00] Carrie: 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. Submit your response to the prompt for a chance to have it read on a future episode of the podcast.
Our guest today is Martha Greenwald. Martha Greenwald is the founding director, creator and curator of the Whowelost and WhowelostKy projects. She is the author of the poetry collection, Other Prohibited Items, which won the Mississippi Review prize for poetry in 2020. She was the first prize winner of the Yeats poetry prize.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Nurture, Slate, Best New Poets, The Threepenny Review and numerous other journals. She's teaching a new class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and collaborating on a radio series with WUKY 91.3 that gives a voice to stories from the Whowelost website.
Martha will also be teaching a free class here at the Jessamine County Public Library, Remembering and Writing about our Loved Ones. We'll talk a little more about the class later in the podcast. Welcome, Martha.
[00:01:26] Martha: Hi, thank you for having me. I'm really honored to be doing this
with you.
[00:01:29] Carrie: Oh, well, thank you so much for joining us.
We're excited to have you. So before we talk about your writing prompt, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about the Whowelost projects.
[00:01:44] Martha: Sure. So Whowelost project started as Whowe lostKy. That's sort of the mothership of the idea. And I got the idea for it initially early last fall in 2020, one day when I was watching one of governor Beshear's press conferences and Dr.
Stack was on and he gave a writing assignment that he asked the audience to, well, audience asked Kentucky to send him letters about how they felt about the pandemic. And he was quite specific that he didn't want email and he didn't want Twitter or Instagram messages. He only wanted people to send him snail mail.
And I found it like a, like a lightning bolt went off in my brain. As someone who taught creative writing for almost 20 years, that he was giving Kentucky a writing assignment. And I thought that was, I thought that was amazing, actually. So I wrote a letter suggesting that to him, suggesting that they had a way of collecting stories for the holidays.
That was the point at which they were severely warning everyone not to go anywhere or do anything for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And he actually wrote me back a really nice handwritten note saying that he liked the idea, but he didn't have time for that. But I was just not going to give up on it because something just told me that this needed to happen.
So I have, I wrote letter after letter with ideas, and then I did hear from someone in the department of family services, health and family services. And I bought a domain name and started creating it. So that's how it started.
[00:03:42] Carrie: That's that's a great story. I love that it started with, with a call for Kentucky to write, to write a letter.
So why did you feel it was, well, I guess maybe first tell people a little bit about the project and, and what kind of stories you collect.
[00:04:02] Martha: Yeah. So the website is encouraging people to write about who they lost during the timeframe of the pandemic. So that could be someone who directly died from COVID or died during this time period that we're all living in, where people were not allowed to have funerals or memorial services and maybe felt they couldn't mourn someone appropriately who, or say everything they really needed to say
when that person passed. And I felt that the site really needed to exist to give people a place to say what they wanted to say away from social media. So there's no commenting allowed and everything that someone submits is reviewed before being posted as a way to put a story someplace safe. So the motto of the site really is shelter their stories.
So it's a place to put them away from nasty comments, away from political virus, you know, banter that is very harmful to people who are grief disenfranchised, which is a large new epidemic in the United States as a result of the pandemic. Another thing about the site that I believe is not present on any other site memorializing COVID victims is we have a writing toolbox.
So the writing toolbox provides direction for people who might be writing hesitant or feel, they don't know what they want to say though they know they want to do it. And they want to say something about their loved one, but they might have maybe bad feelings about themselves as a writer from English class from 50 years ago, or maybe 20 years ago.
And we want to try to get rid of that stigma of that. So there's PDFs and there's, you know, ideas as to how you can go about it. Focusing largely on using detail and very, very specific memories and words, as opposed to just sort of, I miss them. We want them to really tell that.
[00:06:18] Carrie: In a way you're providing writing prompts for, for people who've lost their loved ones.
[00:06:25] Carrie: What's your experience with using these kinds of writing prompts, even, you know, maybe for your own writing about people that you've lost or maybe just in general, either one?
[00:06:38] Martha: Well, I, the prompt that I'm going to suggest we try today is something that I, I do regularly for my own poetry as well as non-fiction that I write. When I taught, I regularly, I use, I always use prompts in creative writing classes.
Usually we would do like an exercise at the beginning of class, so I had various ones I would use. But yeah, they are definitely a part of my writing life.
[00:07:06] Carrie: Um, well, let's go ahead and hear that specific prompt.
[00:07:11] Martha: Okay. It's kind of a two parter and it has two components to it. And it's, it's a little bit on the long side, but I'm going to explain. So one thing that I was really glad I did have a, who we lost websites, both the national and the Kentucky, is that in the submission form, you only have to S you only have to have a few things to be able to hit.
Name, name of the deceased, the story and your email address. And then one more thing, which is you have to have a title. So I have found that the act of asking someone to name their own piece, puts them in the frame of mind that they are writing this story about who they lost. And no one so far has not come up with a good title.
Like almost every single story. It's titled either appropriately or just in an extra, incredibly creative way or something that in a few of the cases just sort of takes my breath away with like, wow. You know, so what I would like us to try for our prompt is, I want us to think about something that you've been wanting or trying to work on for a long time, but maybe haven't been able to.
And then over the course of a few days, I'm going to make this kind of like a long prompt. I want us to think about 10 potential titles for what it is you want to write and write them down on paper, not on your computer or your phone, but really kind of like, think about it. Kind of like hold them to yourself, hold them close and walk around with that idea.
Like, you know, the kind of thing where you might see something or hear something and think like, that would be a good name for that. Like, I'll call it that. So make your list of 10 and then once you have that sort of play with them and think about it. And then winnow it down to five. Toss out, whichever five you think, eh, like that doesn't work and then maybe like a day or so later winnow it down to three.
Once you've got the three, I want us to make ourselves a lexicon of words that you could think about and use for each of those three titles of what you're writing about. And so this works for a short story. It works for poem piece of memoir, anything, and that's probably something I do myself the most is make myself word lists.
Whatever, whatever it is, you're writing, you're going to need that you could use the thesaurus or a dictionary, maybe even a rhyming dictionary, your own notes, whatever it is just to see if sort of got like a basket to pick from and choose and then think about like what those groups are and then pick one and then see if it's fruitful or not for you and see if
the act of having a title and a lexicon that's sort of personal to the piece helps guide you where you want to go with whatever it is, your ideas, and maybe the lexicons you wrote for the other two pieces they might be applicable. Maybe they're not, but maybe you can use them for something else at some other point.
So to me, it's sort of like the title gives you the frame and then the words of the lexicon are like the pieces in the picture frame that maybe we use, maybe you won't, you might not use any of it, but it might take you somewhere
[00:11:06] Carrie: else. Yeah. It almost sounds like you're creating your own prompt for yourself in creating the title and the word banks.
Your prompt is sort of making people create their own prompt.
[00:11:23] Martha: Yeah. I guess you could look at it that way, because I mean, once you have that title, like the finding the titles is like the beginning of the prompt. Right. But then if it's something that you don't know where you're going with it, sometimes just the title can really change.
I I've I've found teaching the nature of where you go with it. Yeah.
[00:11:47] Carrie: So in general, do you come up with your titles first or do you come up with them later or is it kind of a mix
[00:12:00] Martha: it's it's for me, it's usually always been a mix. Yeah. Like there's a poem I'm working on right now that I, like, I was just playing with a word in my head and I just realized that it fit with
notes I had already taken for something else. And then it just sorta jelled like, oh, that's, that's actually what this is about. So I guess it's a lot of playing really. There's a lot of writing exercises that are, are predicated on going quickly or seeing, you know, how many poems you can write in 30 days or there's all those things.
And those things have value and they're really great. But they don't work for everybody. I've found some people really need to be slow and take their time with it. So this is geared toward that idea that there's the slowness is okay. And as well as the exercises that are, you know, super quick,
I know, I often in a workshop, if someone does me a writing prompt and 10 minutes, I like immediately freeze up. So,
[00:13:11] Martha: and I'm the same way completely actually.
[00:13:15] Carrie: So, yeah, so that definitely gives people a little more time. How do you, I mean, you mentioned the dictionary. Are there different places, you find words that you store away and in your word lists or your word bank?
[00:13:33] Martha: I, to me, it can come from anywhere. It's just making sure that you're listening all the time to what's going on around you. So it could, it could come from the dictionary. It could come from the thesaurus. Sometimes I'll just play by taking one word and then just looking in the, in the thesaurus to make sure, you know, see what's there.
And sometimes I won't use any of it at all, but just see where your mind mind goes.
[00:14:01] Carrie: Yeah. I I attended a workshop taught by. Tarfia Faizulah a couple of years ago. And one of the exercises we did in her workshop was to go around, well, she played music and we wrote down words and phrases from songs, and I found that to be really fruitful.
And I think that could be, that could be a good way of building a word bank. And maybe, you know, if you are writing about a loved one, maybe choosing a song that they. Yeah, loved maybe a good way to draw words.
[00:14:37] Martha: Yeah. That's actually one of the suggestions on the Whowelost writing prompts, now that we're going to call it the prompts, the toolbox, to write about a favorite song of the lost loved one or a recipe.
We've I've got recipes in there, so, and someone actually just did that and it's a really beautiful story that I just posted yesterday, actually going from a recipe. So that language could work really well. Something language from someone's job, an object, any of those things.
[00:15:12] Carrie: Okay. So I mentioned at the beginning that you're going to be doing teaching a class here at the library, Remembering and Writing about Our Loved Ones.
Do you wanna tell listeners a little bit about what you'll be doing in that class?
[00:15:26] Martha: So in the class, Remembering and Writing about Our Loved Ones, we will look at ways that we can write about very specific memories that we have about them as a way to paint a picture that shows them who they were as a whole.
Often, if you just write about one thing, it's a lot easier than trying to write their whole life story. It's usually not possible and people find that difficult, but if you just focus on one thing, most people can really describe that thing or aspect of the person in a way that they wind up finding is very meaningful to them, almost as though we're creating just one photograph.
So we'll work on ways to do that.
[00:16:10] Carrie: Great. And that class will be a two-part class. So you'll be writing on Monday, January 24th at 6:00 PM. And the class will be held on Zoom. It's free, but if you, but you will need to register if you want to attend and you can register on our website. Just visit us at Jesspublib.org/events.
And then in the second part of the class, people will be able to share their writing with each other and get feedback. Is that
correct?
[00:16:47] Martha: Yes. It will be something that you can go away with some ideas on the 24th. And then when you come back a week later, you can share what you did over the course of the week, instead of,
keeping up with our earlier thing that we've been talking about that not everyone can do everything immediately with a prompt. This gives you a week to think about it and then write some things down and come back and share them or get feedback if, if you want that feedback.
[00:17:13] Carrie: Okay. Well, we look forward to those classes How about, if, if folks do want to submit a story to Whowelost, how can they go about doing that?
Where were they, where did they find you? So
[00:17:26] Martha: that's a great question. So they can go to Whowelostky.org if they're writing a story about someone who is a Kentuckian, or, or had been a Kentuckyian, or they can also just go to Whowe lost.org for a national story and then go to the Write Their Stories
I item on the menu and the form is right there and hit submit, and I will be happy to read it and post it.
[00:17:56] Carrie: Do you have any final tips final writing tips for our listeners,
[00:18:02] Martha: If an idea comes to you and it seems at that moment to be frivolous or trivial, don't discount it. Like go with whatever that idea is that came to you and explore it.
Because if it's coming to you and speaks to you in some way, then it probably does really have meaning and it may be transformed in what you're writing, but it's, it's there in you and it wants to come out. Don't discount the frivolous.
[00:18:33] Carrie: Well, thank you, Martha. I think that's great advice and we appreciate you coming on to Prompt to Page and sharing it with our listeners.
[00:18:49] Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Prompt to Page podcast. To submit your response to the prompt, visit us at jesspublib.org/prompt-to-page. We also welcome you to join the Jessamine County Public Library's Prompt to Page writing group, which will meet on Tuesday, January 25th at 6:00 PM.
Register on our website. To learn more about the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, visit Carnegiecenterlex.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 One and Two, at the links on our podcast website.
