Writing Prompts for the
Haunted Parts of You
On writing as a tool for embracing your whole story.
Those of you with ghosts
(the pasts you remember, or can’t),
too scattered, inside, to make sense
of the whole, if such a thing even exists:
give them bodies. We all have our
poltergeists, tearing the house apart,
frantic to land, panicked for touch,
for compassion, wishing they had
a home safe enough to live in.
It is—you are.
You are…
What’s Included?
Poetry,
storytelling,
writing prompts
and reflective exercises.
One author wrote,
“I read to know I’m not alone.”
I write for the same reason. Writing has been my means of self-expression—my profoundest of therapies—since I was a boy. I use it to make sense of the world, to make sense of myself.
Writing is, among many things, a toolbox.
It is a shovel by which I excavate what exists in me, a flashlight by which I shine a beam on what I find, a container in which I hold those broken and precious bones, and the means by which I am able to offer what I have pieced back together with the world in what I hope will be the gift of my own scarred life, singing: your wounds—your vulnerabilities—are the gifts through which newness comes.
The testament to the healing that is
possible in and through you.
You.
May these prompts and explorations
serve you well.
Levi Macallister