Weekend Writing Prompt - August 12, 2022
by HDJ Editor, Corey Oglesby
“Untitled” (2012) by Wesley Wright
Once, my roommate and I were sitting around the kitchen table passing a bottle of something back and forth and trading stories. He recounted a time in the second grade when he saved his allowance for three weeks and purchased a velvet bag of plastic rubies from the school book fair to give as a present to the girl he had a crush on. The girl was, unsurprisingly, nonplussed and slightly confused by this gift.
His delivery alone made this a pretty funny story, but what was truly funny was—and I debated even telling him this—that this was actually a story of mine that I’d shared with him a few years prior. He was of course shocked and embarrassed, especially having just performed (unknowingly, I’m convinced) this lie with the kind of animation that only truly lived experience can usually yield. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop laughing.
The simple truth is that my roommate enjoyed the story so much that his brain marked it for processing into the permanent archive. And the story, having then passed through his own, distinct narrative machinery, came out the other side as something inarguably his own. His version had some different details, teeth marks in the pen top that weren’t mine. I enjoyed his version so much that, shit, I just wanted him to keep it. I hope he did.
“Give” a story of yours to someone in your life whose voice you know well. How might they tell it? What details might they dump/highlight? Where might they find humor/tragedy/suspense/etc. where you’ve always found something else? How would their own lived experience affect their perception of the events? Fully pretend you are this person and see if it doesn’t change how you think about your own story.
Corey Oglesby is a poet and musician originally from the Washington, D.C., area, currently living in north Idaho. A 2018 graduate of University of Idaho’s MFA program in Creative Writing, his work has most recently appeared in DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, jubilat, Hobart, The Meadow, Puerto del Sol, Blood Orange Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Fugue Literary Journal from 2017 to 2018, and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Moscow Contemporary art gallery in Moscow, Idaho. He records and performs music as monopines, available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp.
