Choice Words
Photo of yours truly at a protest rally holding some choice words by James Baldwin.
I love a sentence that rocks a rhythm, packs a poetic punch or tells the truth. This deep affection began young. At 8, I borrowed Dr. Suess’s style in one of my first poems: “Happiness makes the whole world gleam, it makes the moon happy, yes I have seen.”
My mother gave me a copy of Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather whose sentences sung to my 14-year-old soul. He wrote, “There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.”
In college, I fell in love with and committed W.S. Merwin’s one-line poem to memory: “Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle; everything I do it stitched with its color.”
When I founded my literary magazines, Thread and Stitch, I became obsessed with opening sentences:
Imagine the nerve: My dealer had gone out of town without informing me beforehand.
Don’t ask why we were in Taco Bell.
The first time I died I wasn’t ready to go.
Sentences are a writer’s stock in trade. We notice them. Study them. Collect them. If you have been here a while, you know that I have devoted many blog posts to them which you can find here.
I share all this to provide background for a project I set into motion last month. Each week, I select a photo from my own collection – you surely have a few – that calls. The photo may elicit a memory, provoke a feeling or just appeal in some way. From there I conjure up something that feels TRUE. I write a draft. Let it sit. Bake. I return to tweak and let it marinate some more. And then, when it feels ready, I post.
It’s a prompt designed in part to practice the craft of writing blended with image and also, for the sheer fun of it.
These sentences are like aphorisms which, according to James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism are the world ‘s shortest form of literature - brief, definitive, personal, philosophical, with a twist. Writing an aphorism is a solid prompt on its own, but pairing it with a photograph doubles its impact.
Check out my first few here from January.
Maybe you want to join in?
Find them on Instagram, Facebook, Linked In, Substack, Bluesky & Threads.
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Coming in June:
“Literary Lightning: Finding the Poetry in Your Prose,” Lighthouse Lit Fest, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 10 - 12 am CT (online)
“A bench with a snowy view is an invitation to feel how winter sits with you.”
- EBB
“Proof that human beings can punctuate the dark with illumination.”
-EBB
“Every day I feel a tug between my longing to relish the world and a yearning to repair it, but without relishing it first, what reason is there for repair?”
-EBB
“Palm trees thriving near snowcapped mountains either reveals that opposites attract or two opposing things can be true at the same time.”
-EBB
“Are we defined by our structure or how we hold the weight of what lays upon us?”
-EBB
