By Hand is a monthly prompt that focuses on freeing our words by using our hands. This month, we’re exploring sorting.
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The hand-driven activity I come back to, week in and week out, is sorting. I take a mess of this and sort it into groups of that. I find it instantly rejuvenating, whether I’m sorting laundry to be put away, sorting recycling into cloth bags, or sorting snacks for bike rides. It doesn’t matter whether I sort in silence, sort to music, or sort while listening to an audiobook — part of my brain is active: the hang-up clothes go here, the cardboard boxes go in the striped bag. As my hands fill baggies with groupings of nuts and dried fruit, I ponder existential questions, like, What is the ideal balance between sweet and salty?
I wouldn’t say sorting is meditative, but it does clear my head. If I’ve been writing for an hour or so and feel stuck, the quickest way to unstick myself is to start sorting. Multiple steps with a minimum of brainpower give ideas time to stand up, stretch, and play. And sometimes light bulb moments happen simply walking to and from the laundry room.
Prompt Guidelines and Options
1. Surely you have something that needs to be sorted. Empty and restock your junk drawer or separate your colors from your whites. Keep a pencil handy or use your phone to jot down any ideas that stand up and wave hello.
2. The next time you can’t find the right word for a poem, or your chapter is bogged down with unnecessary detail, get up, set a timer for 20 minutes, and sort something. When the 20 minutes is up, stop sorting and go back to writing. You can reorganize the entire garage some other day.
3. When we took a cycling trip with a tour group last fall, each morning our guides set out an array of healthy, nonperishable snacks for us to sort into bags, according to our preferences. Since then, I have not made the same snack bags twice. Buy yourself a small plethora of snacks and sort them. Try writing about the taste combinations you create.
4. Try a sensory poem, leaning into the sense of touch.
That’s it! We look forward to what you create when you do it By Hand.
Photo by Tereza Simandlová, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome, author of The Joy of Poetry.
“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”
—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro
- Children’s Book Club: ‘Dry’ by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman - April 9, 2021
- Reading Generously: ‘How to Write a Form Poem’ by Tania Runyan - April 2, 2021
- By Heart: ‘One Art’ + New Tess Gallagher Challenge - March 26, 2021
L.L. Barkat says
I read this earlier this week (in the editorial stage 🙂 ) and used the technique not just for writing, but for life. It worked wonders, clearing my mind and helping me focus on some challenges I needed to focus on. Side benefit: I cleared a small pile of papers from the dining room floor (which conveniently acts as an extra shelf 😉 )
Thanks for the idea (and for making me laugh, with your deep existential salty-sweet question 🙂 ).
Megan Willome says
So glad you found sorting to be a good focusing tool. And clearing even one pile of papers is immensely satisfying.
I’m about to go to the store for a new sweet-salty combo. This last one included chocolate granola and roasted/salted pepitas.
Laura Lynn Brown says
This may be my favorite “by hand” so far.
Megan Willome says
Thank you, Laura!
Donna Falcone says
I love the way you write, Megan. This was so much fun to read, and such a wonderful idea! I am going to make a reminder for myself to try it when I get stuck… in writing, or in my own feelings about things – intentional sorting – I love that. Heaven knows there are so many spaces in my home that will benefit from your tip, too.
For some reason this is reminding me of how, when I still lived with him, I could gauge one of my son’s wellness (and wellbeing, too) by the order (or lack of order) in his room. I knew that once he began a purging of all that “stuff” the act of ‘going through and making decisions’ was helping him gather an internal order and it signaled, to me, that he was finally moving forward. When he’d been through a difficult time I would always feel a huge sense of relief when he started grabbing garbage bags and cleansing wipes from the kitchen cabinet!