Eloise Klein Healy with Nikita
Very quickly and without thinking, write a list of ten red things you have owned or come in contact with in some way in your lifetime. When you read down the list, one or two items will “vibrate” a bit more than the others. Choose one and start a free write about the object. For example, you might have had a red sweater in the fourth grade. It’s OK if you find yourself taken away to another topic–just keep on going. The exercise works on associative powers of language and experience. If you can time yourself, write for five to seven minutes. Now you have some raw material and you can see if you can create something with it. Any color can be chosen–a blue list, a green list, whatever.
Biography of Eloise Klein Healy: Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry: Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation); A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books Of A Feather Press); Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/re-released by Red Hen Press); Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records; and her collections from Red Hen Press, Passing, and most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho. The Inevitable Press published her chapbook Women’s Studies Chronicles in the Laguna Poets Series.
Writers At Work 