Our Route:

Creative Prompt: At Betty's Divine, we recently lost our beloved cat friend, Jethro. Please write a limerick about Jethro or a beloved furry friend of your own. Photographs of your pets highly encouraged.

Creative Prompt: Aliens have landed on Toole. They are wearing boas, they seem benevolent. They ask you to explain your spirituality in two sentences "for intergalactic research." Explain your beliefs about the purpose of life, death and parking tickets to those aliens.

Creative Prompt: Feel your feet press into the ground. Allow the Glacial Lake that once rose past the M to surround you. What swims by? What do you hear? Feel the river rocks at the Lake's bottom and the critters that live in their cool.

Now, allow the Lake to recede, to carry boulders as big as food trucks down the Columbia River Gorge. Let your skin grow hot. Allow the land to dry and green and fill with bison, with people, with a horse-and-buggy downtown. What do you wish we could still see here? Write, doodle or collage a scene where that imagined past and the present meet, for a moment.

Creative Prompt: Make four lists with spaces between each item:

one list of things you see in Butterfly Herbs (dragon, soap, leaf),
one of things you've lost (youth, hygiene, people),
one of the best words you see on the tall shelves of teas and herbs (horchata),
and finally, one of things you've found (heads up penny, balsamroot, old diary).

Rip apart or cut up your lists, so that each individual item (I.e.: dark, pickled octopus, grief) stands alone on its own slip of paper. Then, arrange the words into a poem, or the beginnings of one. Submit the poem and/or collage you make with your lists.

Creative Prompt: Take pictures of the graffiti around you that catches your eye, then print out a few (it's cheap at CVS). Draw or write your own graffiti, if you'd rather. Now, make a collage by splicing the graffiti on top of images from glamour magazines, junk mail, or family pictures. Don't be afraid to break out the scissors and glue.*

*If that sounds like a hassle, that's fair. Write a poem or draw a doodle about how you feel about Missoula's ducks.

Creative Prompt: Write a text, a letter, a postcard, or doodle a doodle for someone living or dead who you love and don't get to see as much as you'd like. Send it to them. Flying Wish Paper* is fabulous for the messages you can't send in the usual ways, or the messages you don't want to send.

Write directly on the Flying Wish Paper, then light it and watch your words careen toward the sky and become something new.

Do you believe in serendipity? Fate? Chance? Coincidence? Pick a color on the walls around you and write your initial feelings about it. The more specific, the better. Why did you choose it? Where does it take you in memory? I bet there's a poem, right there.

For the next few weeks, record where else you see that color. When you're satisfied, add the experience, or the list itself, to your poem.

Visual artists, please draw your list as a series of line drawings in black and white, with one object per image filled in in your color of choice.

Creative Prompt: Write a haiku about the total magic of popping a squat and taking in the Free Cycles dome, a haiku about fall bonfires, or a haiku about your bike.

What's a haiku again? A haiku is short, only three lines long. It has five syllables in the first and third lines. It has seven syllables in the second line. That's the bad news, the good news is the lines don't need to rhyme.

Here are two examples:
Thelma and Louise
enter a haiku "wrong room"
they whisper and leave

river snatch dream girl
manic pixie without pants
hard, work, that nothing

Creative Prompt: If you listen long enough, you're sure to hear the trains rumbling outside. Using the tune to "Home on the Range," write a song about your relationship to trains or the shifting Ceretana Building. Sing it to a squirrel. Ask the squirrel for notes. Report back.

Draw, paint, or write a description of your perfect summer morning. Are you reading? Watching cartoons? Having coffee, tea, a croissant? How many four or two-legged friends are there? Are you inside or outside? What do you hear?

Give that perfect morning to yourself tomorrow or as soon as you can and begin your day by reading the following poem by Mary Oliver:

Creative Prompt: When you leave Imagine today, make time for that thing you love to do but never get around to actually doing. This is your permission!

Next, take a picture of that happy place or activity, then print it out or draw a doodle, and write a small description of what you love about it on the back. Date it. The next time you're here, slip in into one of the books on our shelves for someone to find.

Creative Prompt: Get ahold of a Missoula Valley Lifestyle, a Missoulian, or a New York Times and a Sharpee, spray paint, paint, or markers, and write or draw the story you want to tell that you don't see represented there. If you don't know where to start, start by blacking out words in the articles, leaving behind only what struck you, or a poem you can tease out beneath it.

Go up the first set of stairs, then into the gallery. Write down the first word that comes to mind when you look at the pieces on exhibition. Don't overthink it and don't look ahead.

Please.


Don't do it!

Okay, done? Look at you, you beautiful, disciplined thing. Now, ask yourself if the words reflect the art or your state of mind. Compare your words to the titles of a few of the pieces. Are they strangers or friends to each other?

Capture an image, write a scene, or doodle a comic that centers around miscommunication or characters who aren't hearing each other. How much silliness, loneliness or love do these mistranslations leave in the betweens?"

Creative Prompt: Visual Artist friends, please draw or photograph your kitchen table at a single moment or as a series. Please use the poems and photos from Carrie Mae Weem's Kitchen Table Series, linked below, as a jumping off point.

Writer friends, please write a poem that spins around your kitchen table, inspired by Joy Harjo's poem Perhaps the World Ends Here:

Creative Prompt: Pick your favorite floor of the library. Now, pick a color, any color will do. And off you go! Search the stacks on your chosen floor until you find a book your color. Read the first page of that book. Scribble down or take a picture of your favorite sentence. Note the book's name and author.

Then, write a poem, take a photo, sculpt a sculpture, whittle, doodle, paint, write a creative nonfiction piece, a vignette, or a short story (whatever you like!) that incorporates that sentence or the central idea in it that intrigues you.*

Creative Prompt: Here at the Homestead, there is a 30 year old rhubarb plant, still affectionately called "Bill's Rhubarb" and our apple orchard is one of the oldest in the country still producing fruit. Thanks to the care of the caretakers, the community, and an invisible, subterranean spring, both continue to thrive.

For this visual art prompt go explore the Homestead. Find Little Phoebe (the old mine), the collection of National Geographics, the gears in the box elder trees, the root cellar, then paint, sculpt, photograph, or doodle the most beautiful evidence of aging you see around you.

If you feel like writing instead, reflect on the things--seen and unseen--that you'd like to leave behind.

Creative Prompt: Is it just me, or are the crows especially present on the West and Northsides this year? Write or doodle your pitch to be taken under the crows' wings. What can you offer them? What are you hoping they bring into your life?*

*Wonder-Gizmos is not responsible for any raptures or slippages created between "real" and "fantasy" worlds, supernatural or benign, et. al. during the course of this activity. Please be careful, as we cannot cover any injuries sustained in alternate timelines. We wish we could, but our insurance is crap. We can offer glow-in-the-dark band-aids.

Creative Prompt: Write a flash fiction (a very short story, a good rule of thumb is 1,000 words or less) that centers around an everyday object like an earring, a piece of artwork, or a hand-made good. For your story to really sing, there needs to be some change over time, either to the object itself or a character's relationship to that object. Here's a great example, "Sticks" by George Saunders:

Creative Prompt: Go sit by the water. Allow the current to pass. Write down what you see. Now, travel back in time. Visit a memory. Allow your current self to talk to the you of the past, if you like.

Now, wiggle your toes, come back to the river. To the dippers, the bugs, the people passing by. Scan the trees for bears, for birds. Tense then release your muscles starting at your feet, moving to the top of your head.

Draw the place where you're sitting, take a picture, or write the experience as a poem, held and bookended by today on the river.

Creative Prompt: Write a poem about your most memorable cinematic experience or draw a cartoon about it. Who were you with? Was it tender, silly, or terrifying? Were there snacks? Were you changed irrevocably, or not so much?

Name it "An Ode to The Roxy or "An Ode to [the main performer's name]."