A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library
Today’s poem was inspired by a super short nonfiction piece I wrote a couple years ago. Check it out, then share your own writing in this week’s Drafters Workshop chat, which is now live!
August Theme: The Creative Life
Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?
Week 1: Making Space
What I wrote below is based on the following creative writing prompt included in Saturday’s Writing Prompts for Making Space in Your Creative Life post.
Prompt: Where Creativity Lives
Write a poem about a place where creativity feels possible.
Why did I choose it?
I chose this prompt because I have been thinking about my ideal place for reading and writing and creativity for a long time, like many of us I imagine. But I’ve also written about it in the past. What follows is my response to a different prompt I shared a couple years ago: Describe your ideal room or space. And then following that is my response to today’s prompt, A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library, which was derived from what I wrote in the excerpt you’ll see next, The Lakeside Library.
The Lakeside Library (from the Archive*)
When visitors enter the lakeside library, they encounter large floor-to-ceiling windows, one to the right and one to the left, and a large accordion sliding glass door that’s typically wide open straight ahead, which abuts a lush and expansive garden with a cobblestone path that leads to a still lake in the near distance.
All the floor-to-ceiling glass windows reach twelve feet high and have rows of invisible bookshelves full of both old and new books on them. And the invisible bookshelves wrap around the entire room, which is essentially a sunroom outlined with books. There is no empty window space, but there is enough space between bookshelves to see the lush greenery and natural elements surrounding the room outside. There are also skylights in the ceiling that let in natural light and retract and open to let in natural airflow.
Greens of all shades from the grass and large oak trees contouring the lake in the near distance outside match the green shag rug at the center of the room which is outlined with simple white oak furniture. The two reading chairs to the left and the small reading sofa on the right have ivory-colored cushions and are tilted toward the natural green outside. And the low oval-shaped white oak coffee table in the center of the shag rug and room has an ocean blue glass dish on it that occasionally reflects the water of the lake in the distance when the sun hits it at certain times of the day.
Basically, when one enters the lakeside library, they are immediately greeted by nature and surrounded by nothing but books.
My Response: A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library
Here, the leaves of oak and tomes breathe alive novel breaks through every spine and branch ignited by sunstruck cradled clouds of words full of treasures and dreams ready to meet their new emerging dawn that filters sparks of Dewey vitality into this budding space of stories that meet the page amidst the natural flow of air under the canopy of inspiration breezing through the glass accordion directly from the mirror lake mid-morn over the cobblestones and verdant hedges and forget-me-not notes of prose to still this heady hue of ink into legible forms and tones and lines of composition recorded in fragments of text that wander back out to the path again by noon where they retrace their invisible narrative steps of soul into metaphors and time all the way to the edge of the shore where they dive into the cool waters of lore that reflect inside the ocean blue dish on a table with hints of the drama at dusk when no one is watching and the lakeside library animates anew under the moon as the illumination of the day and all its tales come to the end of another chapter in a day of a creative space full of intangible life that is nurtured far into the night.
My Reflection and an Invitation
I’ve never tried to create a poem from lines of nonfiction text I’ve written before, so this was an entirely new experience for me. I will probably make my way back to this poem in the future so that I can revise it or scrap it altogether. We’ll see what I think of it tomorrow…. and the day after that... But for now, I think it mostly aligns with the one space where creativity will always feel possible for me: The Lakeside Library. Over the past several years, I have dreamt of this place often. And somehow, I keep finding ways to work it into my writing in various ways, especially when I start thinking about my creative lifestyle.
How about you? What did this prompt or creative writing piece surface for you?
Leave a comment or join this week’s Drafters Workshop chat so we can discuss it or your own writing related to Writing Prompts for Making Space in Your Creative Life.
Whether you join the chat to share your responses to this week’s prompts, ask questions, workshop an excerpt of something else you’ve written, or simply want to encourage others, we’d love to see you there as we explore what it means to make space for our creative lives this week.
Continue Exploring The Creative Life (August Series)
This week’s Posts: Making Space
Writing Prompts for Making Space in Your Creative Life
Consider going more in depth with this month’s theme with The Creative Life Writing Collection
Every prompt, draft, and dialogue begins a conversation, but some of those conversations deserve more of our time and attention.
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