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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 with Wes Blake, Episode 44
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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 Wes Blake.
Wes is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize and finalist for the Feathered Quill Book Award for debut author. The book was featured on Deep South Magazine's fall-winter reading list, 2024-2025. Blake has been called a writer to watch by Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin.
His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Story South, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Louisiana Literature Journal among others, and he holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writer Studio. Wes [00:01:00] lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky with his wife and cats, where they've planted over 100 trees. Learn more at wesblake.com.
And welcome . Thanks for joining us.
Wes: Hey, Carrie. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Carrie: So, I understand that you and the narrator of the audiobook of your book, both have connections to Jessamine County.
Wes: We do. Yeah. So, I taught high school English at Jessamine County, West Jessamine High School for six years, from 2012 to 2018.
And that was a lot of fun. Actually another poet, Matt Houghton, taught there as well, but like you said, the narrator, Mike, Joey Mao, Michael Mao. He, he taught at Providence and he taught at East for years and years. And so he did a fantastic job, narrating the book.
And he has a podcast, so he has all the, you know, the, you know how it is. He has all the knowhow there, and so he did a fantastic job. So, yeah, it's,
Carrie: that's great.
Wes: It's all kinds of Jessamine County roots there.
Carrie: Well, that's great. We're glad that you're here with [00:02:00] us then. And Joey, did he, did he also have experience with narrating audio books?
I'm just curious about how that process worked.
Wes: Yes, he did. He did. He had done, I wanna say that, that when he narrated mine, he had, he had done maybe, um. Maybe, oh, I don't know. I'm, I'm ballpark here. Maybe 14 or 15 he had done, so he, he had done them before, which was great. So he had some experience and you know, he was able to give me a friend price, so that was nice.
Carrie: Yeah, friend prices are always good. And we do have your audiobook available through Hoopla, so if anybody is interested in listening, alongside the, we do have the physical book as well, that is available for our patrons.
Wes: Awesome.
Carrie: Pineville Trace is a novella in flash. Do you wanna describe what that means to people who might not be familiar with that term?
Wes: Sure. So the [00:03:00] novella in flash, it's just kind of a melding of two forms. So it's, it's a novella, which, Mick Jeffries described this, I was on his show, , his radio show, and he said, so basically novella is just like, it's, it's a pony and a novel's a horse. And I was like, yep, that's it. I love that.
I never heard that before, but, but yeah, a novel, a novella is just a shorter novel. So. This one clocks in at right about, you know, about 140 pages. And that's, that's about standard, you know, actually, I, I lied. It's about 126 pages before you get to the credits, which is about standard. You know, novellas, if you've read books like Of Mice and Men,
Trained Dreams by Dennis Johnson. Y you know, you, you kind of have an idea of, of a novella length, book, and so it tells an ongoing story. There's one storyline that it tells about a former faith healer and a revival preacher who walks away from a minimum security prison in Eastern Kentucky in the [00:04:00] 1970s.
And, he's befriended this stray cat and named, he names her Buffalo and they take off together. Mm-hmm. So that, that's kind of the, the, the premise of the, the ongoing story that it's told throughout the entire novella. But the flash part comes in, each chapter ha has a title, kinda like a short story collection would, and so each, each individual chapter is, is called a what we call a flash fiction story, which is just a, a story that's a thousand words or less.
That te that tells its self-contained, tells its own story. So each, each chapter tells this ongoing story of about this, um, this former faith healer that's walked away from prison, but then it also stands on its own. It's, and the, the, the intent was that those stories, you could pick one up and read it and it would tell, it would be its own complete, own complete thing.
Its own complete story, but they add up together. So that's, mm-hmm. That's a long description of what a novella in flash is.
Carrie: As a [00:05:00] poet who, you know, when I work on creating a collection, you know, I don't always write them in a particular order, the poems, was that similar for you or did you kind of have that like a clear narrative arc?
In your mind as you went through.
Wes: So when I wrote this, I, I knew I had an idea. There's a, there's a writer called, uh, Donald, Donald Barthlme. He is a writer that has this essay called Not Knowing, where he kind of has, he, he has this idea that mm-hmm. You know, writing is an act of discovery. David Domine, the Kentucky writer, I did an event with at Carmichaels a while back.
He said, there's, the pantsers and there's, plotters. So do you write by the seat of your pants? The plotter? And so for this book, it's a little bit of both. So I kind of, I had a beginning point, you know, like I was mentioning, I knew that, that this character was gonna walk away from this prison with this cat named Buffalo.
And, and I kind of had a general idea of where he might go. But how he would [00:06:00] get there and how it would work out, I didn't know. It was, it was interesting to write because to, to your point, it's kind of this, this flash fiction form is very close to a narrative poem, so it's almost kind of mm-hmm. It's kind of, it's very close to that.
It's, it's, um, it's flash fiction, but it, it's, it shares 'cause it's so concise, it shares some things, some similarities with the narrative poem. But when I would write, a lot of times I would write one, chapter and some object or image or, or, or line or phrase or theme would, would echo into the next chapter or
perhaps some other side or aspect of that would need, would need to, to be expanded on. And so it was a very intuitive process that because I, I was dealing with two things. I was dealing with this overall story like where does this character, Frank Russett and his cat Buffalo, where are they gonna go?
What's gonna [00:07:00] happen to them? And, and I was al also navigating, you know, these individual, you know, these chap, these flash fiction stories that stand on their own. And so it was, it was a, it was a challenge to do that. It was almost scary a little bit 'cause you kind of go in and, and each, each chapter is really new and so,
Carrie: right.
Wes: But, but it did, the, the text itself and what I had written before, I found that, um, I found actually that I kind of intuitively followed a lot of my obsessions, and I would see them in the page and they would lead me to the next.
Carrie: Yeah, and what you're talking about there really ties in very nicely to, our April guest, Lynnell Edwards, which that hasn't aired yet, as we're recording this.
But she talked about writing poems in series and how very often, I mean, her process description was almost exactly what yours was about, the flash fiction, that you [00:08:00] can prompt yourself with what you've already written.
Wes: That's in. That's interesting.
Carrie: Other than prompting yourself with an image or an obsession that's appeared in previous stories, how do prompts play a role in your writing?
Or do they?
Wes: You know, when I was a, a student at the MFA program at EKU, the Bluegrass Writers Studio, there was a prompt that, that we had, and I can't remember exactly, it's been, it's been a number of years, but it was, it was kind of, I kind of incorporated some memory of it in my prompt that I mentioned later, but it was, it, it, the gist of it was R. Dean Johnson was the teacher.
The, the ri the writer R. Dean Johnson was teaching that class and he had a prompt just kind of asking us to, think about different periods of our life and things that, and objects and things that we were obsessed with and, to make a list of those and it kind of went from there. But that, I don't, I don't really do that formally now, now that I'm out of the program, but I'll [00:09:00] kind of talk about this in a little bit later.
But I do keep that idea of, of kind of remembering what, what, what you've been obsessed with is still something that, that has stuck with me and kind I'll, I keep, on my phone, I have a note that, that a writing note and I just keep all these ideas of things that, that, that the ideas that keep coming back to me that I'm kind of obsessed with.
Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I, I think that's probably the best answer to that. I don't often sit down and formally have a prompt, but I, I have had some great prompts that I think have just kind of naturally kind of worked their way into my, idea generation is probably the part where it, it plays the biggest part.
Carrie: Okay, so would you like to go ahead and share the prompt that you wanted to talk about today?
Wes: So this prompt, it came to my attention in 2014 and so it's really, it's kind of nice to talk about with this book Pineville Trace because it's very connected with this main character, Frank Russett, this former revival preacher and faith [00:10:00] healer.
I got the idea for this fictional character back in 2014. , Bluegrass Writers Studio has a summer connection with, Disquiet. Disquiet is a writer's conference that takes place in Lisbon, Portugal. And so each summer students had the, I had the option to, to go and study there, under writers, North American writers in Lisbon, Portugal.
And so I went there and one of the, one of the speakers, one of the writers that was given a, a speech, and I really want to try to, I've, I've reached out to so many people that were there. We're trying to figure out who it is. One day the person's name will come back and we'll give them all this credit retroactively, and, we'll take out a big newspaper ad and give them credit or something.
But, they said something that really struck with me, and it's the heart of this prompt. And what they said was, four words, wait a minute, no five. Write about what obsesses you. Write about what obsesses you. And I found that, that just kind of stopped me in my tracks when I heard it. And I, I was, I, [00:11:00] I, I kept turning that over. Write
about what obsesses you. And that was really important to me. I was trying to figure out, what my novel, I wanted to come out of the MFA program with a novel, and so I was really search, searching for my subject and that really guided me and mm-hmm. I think it's a lot. Meg Shaffer and a few other writers.
We had a, we had a panel at, the Louisville Book Festival, early this last summer rather. And we talked about this idea, you know, write about what you know, and I feel like write about what obsesses you is more instructive. As a writer. Mm-hmm. Um, it is for me and I, I I, I, I feel it might be for other folks as well.
I feel like it's more instructive because it guides you more, you know, like we know a lot of things, but it doesn't really guide you to your subject. But when you write about what obsesses you, it, it, it, it guides you towards things that are important to you, maybe in some way that you don't fully understand even.
Mm-hmm. And, Steve Almond, he had an [00:12:00] online virtual webinar that I went to a few years ago. And he really was into this idea. He talked about how Moby Dick was written about this guy that's obsessed with revenge. You know, Greg Gatsby was written about this character that was obsessed, you know, with, with this woman Daisy that he was in love with.
And, and so, so much of, of, of literature is about obsession and as a reader, the great thing is about this writing prompt is that it's good for readers too. And so if you're a reader and you're reading about something that the writer is obsessed with, there's energy there. You know, it, it's, it's not, it's almost never gonna be dull.
If you're writing about what you're obsessed about and there's an energy there, it's rarely gonna be dull. You'd have to work hard to make it dull and, uh, and, uh, anyways, yeah, you can see this in great filmmakers. Like you look at David Lynch's work, you kind of see these things, some same things, pile up.
And he, he was just mining his subconscious, I think, for what he was obsessed with. And that's it, it, it [00:13:00] really hooks, viewers and, and readers too.
Carrie: Yeah. So I guess one question I have is, I feel like often I don't know what I'm obsessed about until I start writing about it. So how do you figure out what you're obsessed with?
Wes: Very true. That's very true. So, so it's often the same for me when I was writing this book, Pineville Trace some of these I, some of these things, I just noticed them coming up again and again. It was almost intuitive. Mm-hmm. There's a couple ways to get at that. One thing I do, like I mentioned, this is more of a long-term kind of process that I would suggest to, to other writers keep however you do it.
I do it sometimes on a, I mentioned actually in Pineville Trace, there's a chapter where I talked about the idea generation for this, the idea that this came to me, it breaks the fourth wall one time. And I was recording this on my voice recorder driving around Pine Mountain in Eastern Kentucky.
So to to that point, I think sometimes be, be ready to record ideas when they come to you, because if an idea comes to [00:14:00] you and then you're excited about it and you have a lot of energy about it, don't lose that idea. Like, hold onto that idea, however you can. That's one piece of it.
And also these ideas that are recurring, perhaps things that are recur. Maybe it's a recurring dream. Even if it makes no sense, write it down. 'cause there might be something in there that later when you write it, as you said, Carrie, you'll write about it and discover what it is. What, what is this? Why is this coming back to me?
Things that come back to you, really pay attention to that. Write them down whether, for me, it's just a Apple, you know, like on my iPhone note, you know, but if it's a notepad or whatever, however you keep your ideas down, you know, track those things that keep coming back, track the thi, the ideas that come to you that you're excited about, that have a lot of energy and urgency.
I would say another thing that I do. I set a, a timer when I write and, I believe it's Annie Dillard who had mentioned this as well. No, it's not Annie Dillard, but, it'll come back to me, but there's someone else who recommended this. Mm-hmm. But anyways, I set a [00:15:00] timer when I write, and I, I, I like this because it forces me to get right into it and I can't put it off.
I can't think too much. I just have to get into it, 'cause I've only got, you know. 30 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is, whatever, you know, when I have the time I put it there, sometimes it's longer, but I get right into it. And so this kind of forces you just to, just to get your ideas down without thinking about them too much and kind of take the filter off.
I would say as much as possible, take your filter off when you're getting your first draft down. Don't worry about it being perfect, getting your idea, get your ideas down on the page, and you may find that, wait a minute, why does that keep coming up? And, and there it is. Mm-hmm. You've got some of your obsessions are there on the page.
Carrie: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We've had other guests who are either pro timer or anti timer. But I think it's definitely worth trying if you haven't done it before. So did you, have any other suggestions for how to, how to work with this [00:16:00] prompt?
Wes: Yes. I would say I've got a prompt that I, I would walk folks through just kind of a concrete prompt.
So this kind of helps you get at this, the get at writing about your obsession. So here, here, here's what you could do if you want to generate this in a very direct way. So set it, and again, the timer thing, if it works for you, great. If not for me, it it, it helps me get outta my own way. And maybe I have some level of ADD and have trouble focusing, but at least during these 30 minutes, everything else is out.
So it helps me do that. And it helps me stop procrastinating because I've only got 15 minutes and the time is going or whatever it is, but so, mm-hmm. Here, here's a prompt that you could try to, to get it some to, to use this idea in your writing. Set a timer for four minutes. During that four minute period, write down everything that you've been obsessed with in your life.
Don't think about this for a long time. Write highbrow and lowbrow things. Think about different eras of your life, different periods of your life. [00:17:00] Think about foods, cartoons, stuffed animals, restaurants, brands, watches, flowers, bands, albums, athletes, actors, sports, hobbies, singers, songs, instruments, TV shows, movies, celebrities, toys, writers, shirts, hats, jewelry, candy, places, romantic interests, cars, shoes, jokes.
The gambit, the full gambit, everything. Right? Just write it down. Four minutes, everything that comes into your mind through all these eras of your life, write them down. Right? And some of them are gonna be embarrassing. That's, that's great. Put them down. Like on my list, Garfield would make my list, which is, you know, so, okay.
That's part one. Four minutes. You're writing all this down. Okay. Part two. When that timer ends, look over your list and think about how an item on that list could lead to a longer or a more finished piece of writing. Think about what was going on in your life and your inner emotional life during [00:18:00] each phase of obsession with these objects or things that you've written down.
For part two, write it. What, think about, what about your inner life? Does your obsession with these things reveal? What purpose did your obsessions hold and why did you cling to them? What did they do for you? So, a lot of great works deal with obsession. You know, we were just talking about, you know, Melville wrote about a guy obsessed with a whale, Fitzgerald wrote about a guy named Gatsby who's obsessed with a girl.
You know, the famous short, short story that Gogol wrote was about a guy obsessed with an overcoat, right? So, the list goes on and on. So that's a writing prompt that you could use and kind of get at some things that, that, you know, try to kind of mine, like you said, Carrie, how do you mine what your obsessions are?
And that, so for one example, I'd mentioned Steve Almond was kind of on the same page with this as well, and, and those of you that may not be aware, he has this book called Candy Freak. And when he was a [00:19:00] kid, he was obsessed with candy and so he wrote a book about it. And so the book is really about those of you that haven't read it, and this isn't a big spoiler alert, but the book, he goes on this, he kind one part of the book is he kind of goes on this tour of all these like little candy factories.
And like as I was reading it, it was like, you've gotta go like to Ruth Hunt, you know, you've gotta, there's so many great ones in Kentucky, and he kind of went through the history of. You know, who, who are these folks that are still making candy and like locally, independently and like the whole, how it all became corporate took it over.
And it's kind of this whole story, like it's kind of a microcosm of America, but it's also about he got into, why was he obsessed with candy? And so really what the candy was, it was really about his depression. So he suffered mm-hmm. From depression throughout his life. And candy was kind of a way, it, it was something that made him feel better.
Something that kind of was a, a tonic or a a, a self, uh, you know, self-medicating thing. And [00:20:00] so throughout this process, he really gets into that, which is multilayered. So you, I, I mentioned that just to say. This might help you think about what value there is in a prompt like this.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Because the thing is representing some emotion or yearning that's underneath.
Wes: Yes, absolutely. And that even, and even something like some candy, you know, it, it's something that's so, seemingly meaningless, right? Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, that I, I think that that's a prompt I would recommend to folks and I think that, you know, it may or may not be helpful, but it's something you could definitely try.
Carrie: Oh, absolutely. Well, do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners?
Wes: You know, I guess the, I'm looking at it right now on my, table here. And so I've got a little note card. My wife made me put it in a, frame. It is just stuck to the wall for a while.
And so Isak Denisen, it's a, it's a quote [00:21:00] from, from, from her and, it's, write a little every day, without hope, without despair. Write a little every day without hope, without despair, and that, that is important for me because it's, it, it's very doable. Anyone can write a little every day. Right. We're all busy, like, you know, we have a lot of responsibilities outside of writing.
And so if you write a little every day, Chris Offut, he in a speech at, the Carnegie Center Center Books in Progress Conference. He actually said his goal is to write one minute a day, at at least one minute a day. And you find if you get in and write one minute a day, you end up writing more.
So write a little every day. That'll keep your mind in, in it. Your, your subconscious works on what you're writing, what you're working on when you're not writing. If you stay in it every day and you get in that world, and without hope, without despair, that's important. It doesn't help your writing to, [00:22:00] to think it's amazing while you wrote it or after you wrote it.
And it doesn't help your writing to have despair, you know, thinking it's just completely worthless. That's not helpful either. It, it, mm-hmm. But truly to do it objectively, you know, let it sit on the page and later you can decide whether to keep it or not. So that, that's a bit of advice, a bit of advice I'd really, recommend to folks.
That's my, that's, that's my final thought there.
Carrie: Well thank you so much for sharing your experience with writing about obsessions and generating from that. We really appreciate you being here.
Wes: Thank you for having me, Carrie. I really appreciate it. It's good to be here.
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 music is by [00:23:00] 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.