Today’s Quadrille prompt at dVerse Poets Pub is hum. The dVerse Quadrille is a poem of exactly 44 words. After my surgery in March, I lost my voice. When it didn’t get better, we worried that there was damage from intubation, but the little camera up my nose and down my throat didn’t see damage to my vocal chords. The culprit appears to be rapid weight loss changing the support around my larynx, and removal of many of the organs that would have supported my diaphragm and breath control (most of my intestines). As a singer, this has been very traumatic. But, with vocal therapy, my speaking voice is getting better. Sometimes I even sound like myself for a moment. Hum has a very different meaning for me now.
Daily Hum
in a sitz bath epsom salts curtain closed
Not an earwormed melody
Even a hum is no longer a hum but work, exercise resistance training
Hum sounds to mean words in conversation when you can, she said.
Writober starts in less than two weeks. I’m finding that hard to believe. I was looking at last year’s announcement post and realized this will be my tenth year of writing daily flash fiction for Writober. I’ve been going through all my old posts removing or fixing dead links, so I’ve taken a good look at how Writober has evolved. Here’s the history of Writober here on Experience Writing.
Writober Flash Fiction: In 2016 I happened upon a writing challenge called #Writober on the Wattpad writing platform. The organizer, J.S. Nagy a.k.a @BrassGoblin, created a pinterest board and challenged himself to write a 101 word story inspired by one picture each day. He asked other writers to join him and read each other’s stories on Wattpad. The stories inspired by the challenge were fun. One of my stories was even published!
The next year, I got excited to add some of my own images to the #Writober board, so I contacted J.S. Nagy to see if he had started planning. Sadly, for me, not him, he was headed to Japan and didn’t have time for it. So I took on #Writober 2 and have continued it since.
In the mood to look at spooky creepy images? You can look at all of the Writober prompt images from previous Writobers on my Pinterest profile.
OctPoWriMo: I started participating in the OctPoWriMo daily poetry challenge in 2017. At that time Morgan Dragonwillow had been hosting it for six years. She enjoyed April’s National Poetry Month daily prompts so much, she wanted another poetry month in the fall. I had taken the CalArts poetry workshop online through coursera.org for the first time that September and thought it would be fun to challenge myself to continue writing poetry with a daily poetry writing challenge. I also wondered how my #Writober 2 images would interact with their inspirational prompts.
I really enjoyed OctPoWriMo and even volunteered to write some of the prompt posts on the OctPoWriMo site in 2019.
Sadly, Morgan was unable to continue hosting. In 2022 the site was moved to OctPoWriMo 2022 on blogspot and the prompts are still up.
In 2023 I saw that no one was planning to host OctPoWriMo, so I took it on and have been providing the daily prompts since.
Halloween Photography Challenge: I found Tourmaline.’s Halloween Photography Challenge in 2021. Because I love abstract photography, and illustrate my posts with my own photos, joining this challenge was perfect for me. I found the one-word Halloween-themed prompts very inspirational, and really enjoyed Tourmaline.’s toy photography.
But like the other two challenges I enjoyed, Tourmaline. stopped hosting her challenge. So in 2023 I took on hosting this challenge as well.
The Evolution: Each year, for the last nine years, Writober has grown and changed and evolved.
2016: I participated in Writober for the first time. 2017: I made the #Writober 2 pinterest board and hosted Writober. I participated in OctPoWriMo for the first time. 2018: I hosted #Writober 3. I was in New Orleans for a reunion with my band The Rubber Maids. I only participated to the thirteenth. 2019: Posts have a fun Writing Process and Tools section 2020: Posts have links to horror flash stories and online journals. I’ve checked all the links, so the journals and stories with links should still be active, or can still be read. 2021: I explored “sonic surrender” in my poetry, participated in Tourmaline.’s Halloween Photography challenge for the first time, and made little dioramas for my photos. 2022: I tried to bring attention to the artists of the Writober prompt images by linking to their sites. I started making up my own OctPoWriMo prompts on days there weren’t prompts. Tourmaline. stopped posting. And I started incorporating contradictory abstract nouns into my work. 2023: The first year I hosted all three challenges. The theme was Facing Our Fears. 2024: The theme was Universal Fears. I was very ambitious with exercises to fight fear of the blank page, poetry toolbox exercises, example poems, and get moving suggestions. It started with the building blocks of language, and explored rhetorical devices. I tried using abstractions for the photography prompts. 2025: The theme was Our Deepest Fears. The prompts started with surface detail and sensory perceptions and attempted to go deeper connecting surface detail to psychological and emotional aspects of fear. The photo prompts were focused on Monsters.
There’s a lot of really great information and fun resources in these previous posts. If you want to do some exploring, just scroll to the very bottom of the page and click Select Month. Select October of the year you’re interested in and click on any post from that month. It’s a Halloween time machine!
Thank you to everyone who has participated over the years. Your poems, stories, and photos have been so fun. And thank you for all your likes and comments on my work. The turn of the season is such an inspiring time. It’s exciting to have you to share it with.
This Tenth Year
This year is not only special because it’s our tenth Writober, but because I’m alive to share it with you. I’m on my third round of this try at chemo (it got put on hold because of emergency surgery) and although it has bad side effects, I am determined to have our prompts up and have a lot of fun this year. One thing I’ve learned on this medical journey is that I have to be flexible and stay in the now because plans will change; time is not mine to command. I have high hopes, but I also want to be realistic. So this year, I may not write a poem, a flash fiction, and make an image every day, and that’s okay. If I do one thing each day, I will be very happy. And I hope you will join me, so we can celebrate together.
Each year I’ve been trying to find ways to have all three challenges work together. To do that this year, the daily one-word prompt for the photography challenge will also tie into the poetry prompt and the flash fiction prompt. I will be using my own photographs for the flash fiction prompt. I want to explore photography techniques that make photos spooky and scary, so the image will also represent a photography technique to try.
This year I found Countdown to Halloween and signed us up. Experience Writing is now one of the 2026 Cryptkeepers holding a month-long blogging marathon for Halloween.
I’m excited to explore the other sites celebrating Halloween all October long. If you plan on posting every day during Writober, you might want to sign up too!
The Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub was to write a poem to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (1936). I listened to the song and explored the imagery it evoked. I think I might be influenced by the Imagists we’re studying in ModPo this week.
Swallowed Whole by Maria L. Berg 2026
New Poem
Swallowed Whole
Marbles—glass God’s eyes— disguised in pastel plastic rolling down a half-tube into the dark gaping maw of a hungry hungry hippo
the pink one hinged, snapping
a dead branch breaks off a moss-spotted tree
(I don’t know what kind of tree)
but it is still a tree, the same tree only changed
It starts with silver tubes branching, twisting, reaching like a nest of fat snakes the moan of a tortured soul realizing it’s the monster torn apart and pieced back together swells to an awful sound an unpleasant Everest then dies and starts again
Writober 2026
We’re already half-way through September and that means Writober is coming very soon. What is Writober? Writober, here at Experience Writing, is a month-long daily writing, photography, and creativity challenge celebrating all things Halloween. The last couple of years the prompts explored Universal Fears and Our Deepest Fears. This year, the theme is Fun Friendly Fears. We’ll be exploring why and how we find the spooky and scary, fun while generating and sharing poetry, flash fiction, photos and/or any other creative endeavor that the season inspires.
I’ll be writing more about this year’s Writober in the coming days. I just wanted to let you know it’s happening. I’m excited, working on the prompts, and I hope you’ll join me this October.
Yesterday’s poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub celebrated Teachers’ Day in India. Punam challenged us to write a poem about our teacher.
New Poem
Precocious ~from the Latin praecox meaning early ripening
I remember Miss Bernie who saw me recognized the need in a precocious child and supplied a home- made packet of extra work. Not more reading, not more math, but art challenges, like my failed line drawing that still disappoints this perfectionist. It took a long time to learn how to draw the image I wanted without taking the pen off the page a skill I now use often.
I’m still precocious often the youngest always thinking I’m at least a year older than I am But these days I create my own packets of extra work and my teacher is the mountain, the lake, the sky, eagle, blue heron, hummingbird, and crow. They teach me constancy in constant dramatic change. They teach me patient wisdom and durable hope. They teach me to continue to soar and circle to see the light on the waves in drought or abundance to stay present and appreciate.
Motion draws my eye, a bee at the hummingbird’s favorite trumpet flower pulling down the vine, making it bounce. It’s name? I don’t remember and I won’t look it up because this is stream of consciousness. The focus music I’m listening to to drown out the cow in a can sounding mole deterrents in the yard sounds like a stream, more of a brook, babbling as it tumbles over rocks. In motion. I need to stay in motion. Motion distracts from the itch, the pain, the horrorshow that is my current face, the threat in motion inside me. While I felt stagnant between surgery and treatment the monster was in motion replicating replicants. Now its the pustules in motion replicating from my face down my chest. My first thoughts of motion were how it rhymes with lotion. The motion of applying lotion—which lotion? Where’s my Eucerin lotion? My aloe?—is a new obsession. I’ve never liked lotion, no matter how non-oily it says it is, it feels sticky-icky to me, but that’s nothing compared to constant burning-itchy. Strange how quickly life-long dislikes don’t matter in times of survival. The scale of needs-must always in motion leaves me swirling in the surreal. A boat went by. The lake is in motion. Waves rippling to both sides from center. Rain droplets radiate their own waves in, on, and around them. Now the waves are bouncing back from shore at angles. I love being in the rain yet separate from it in this covered porch, like watching a play, safe in the seats while the actors are in motion during a scene change. The false walls turn and we’re all transported to another world.
Note to poets: I had noticed a lot of strange traffic to my site this last year. The wordpress forums assured me that the little bots constantly visiting my old posts were nothing to worry about and harmless, but that didn’t sit right with me. They had to be doing something. Then I happened to click on an old link to OctPoWriMo dot com and up popped a Chinese betting site. I spent a lot of time removing all those links from years of posts. Then, this week, I was inspired by a collage group in the ModPo discussions to look back at the collages I made from Poets & Writers Magazines in April of 2024, and to my surprise when I clicked on a Poetry Non-Stop link in my post, it went to a betting site in Singapore. I’ve been spending a lot of time going through old posts and removing all the dead and changed links. People keep saying that the internet is forever, but I’m learning quite the opposite: Be careful what you link to, because the internet is impermanent, websites die in the blink of an eye, and are quickly turned into betting sites that somehow change the visit numbers in your stats. (I also removed all of my links to NaNoWriMo because it is defunct and the website is parked.)
urge, urge by Maria L. Berg 2026
New Poem
Today at the dVerse Poets Pub, Grace challenges us with an interesting poetry form called a Descort: a poem of deliberate difference. This form from the late 12th century has a main rule which is every line must be different from every other line, intentionally disrupting expectations. Sounds great!!
We Want That; It Means It’s Working
Small white pustules that never pop urge, urge Don’t touch! I touch the burning itch at the side of my left nostril (jävla häxunge) It’s okay, I say But, no. It’s really not.
I’m having a reaction to the recommended cream for the reaction Of course I am burning red as a fire engine can’t imagine not scratching my face off
The next terrible side effect from the medicine to combat the last side effect from the poison infusion that’s saving my life. L’enfer, c’est ici. I am forever changed.
How far from Me will I be when the final effect is relief?
A very quick writer’s life update: Last December I was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer and started chemo. I had a mass the size of a football on an ovary (I looked nine months pregnant) and another large one in my colon. The two tumors pushed together and completely blocked my colon in late March which led to a dangerous (since I had just had my chemo infusion) emergency surgery and now I have a permanent ileostomy and neuropathy in my hands and feet. After recovery, in July, I had another small surgery for an abscess where they inserted a seton which will have to be removed in the next couple months. And finally, last week, I began chemo again.
Strangely, now that my treatment is starting again, life seems less surreal and I feel like I have a little more control over my time and my mind (though that’s probably a delusion), which is evident in the fact that I am doing something I usually do, ModPo. The ModPo Symposium Mode began this week. ModPo is the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course offered by the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera.org. But it’s so much more than that. There are daily zoom discussions with different TAs as “office hours”, and a weekly live webcast. There are discussion forums and study groups and as many ways to explore the poems as people can think of.
This first week introduces Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. As usual, I am surprised to see the same poems in new ways. This is my sixth ModPo and I’m so glad I can participate. I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s completely free and you can participate as much or as little as you want.
New Poem
Yesterday’s Poetics prompt at dVerse inspired me, but yet again—as has been the norm for many months—I didn’t write or post a poem. But this morning, I rolled over and grabbed my journal and wrote to Dora’s prompt before getting out of bed.
To Sip the Life-giving Water
and I’m reminded of the crow that comes upon a bottle containing water she cannot reach so she collects pebbles rocks stones and drops them one by one through the open mouth the collection displaces the water rises the crow flies diving at a hint of a glint the look of the rock doesn’t matter only that it will fit will pass through will fall into place how many times will she return? how many times will she repeat just one more stone? the crow must be so thirsty
Twelve mugs I designed with a photo of light, water, and grass
I’m excited to share that Heron Tree has compiled all of the poems they published for their twelfth year into a free downloadable PDF.
Usually the editors suggest an interesting text or two for poets to work from, but for their twelfth year, they requested that poets select a text from before 1930 and use the number 12 in some way in the composition. I have two poems in the collection on pages 25 and 42.
I want to thank Heron Tree’s editors, Rebecca Resinski and Chris Campolo for all their great work. It’s an attractive collection. Each poem is followed by an informative page that identifies the text and process used to create the poem. It’s a really fun read and you can’t beat the price! I highly recommend heading over to Heron Tree and getting your copy.
Yesterday’s Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub was to choose one of four paintings by Chagall and write an ekphrastic poem. My focus this year is surreality. As Chagall’s dream imagery had an influence on the surrealists, I felt inspired to start my surreality posts with a poem to this prompt.
Marc Chagall, I and the Village (1911)
Return to an Upside-down World
“emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring”~Jean Leymarie
We each wear our beads, bear our crosses count our blessings Our pink mouths in the circle mouths as pink as the road into town a circle of life I feed you You feed me The farmer returns to an upside-down world His scythe, heavy on his shoulder, holds his back leg to the road When he is far behind us, I bring offerings, but you ache, yearning only for the milkmaid I am green to you
🌊This post is part of this year’s ongoing depth study 🧩This post explores the definition of depth as the middle of a time
The Middle of a Time by Maria L. Berg 2025
This year’s depth study is coming to a close, but there are still some definitions I want to look at. One that I find fascinating is “the middle of a time.” For some reason the examples I’ve found use the plural of depth such as: the depths of winter, the depths of the depression, etc. And though we are past the middle of the year, when it comes to this study, I would say we are in the depths of depth.
While contemplating depth and its relationship to time I came across several interesting concepts: Deep Time, Time-depth, and Time Depth. Let’s take a look at each.
Deep Time is the vastness of geological time. It spans billions of years which is hard for humans to grasp due to our short existence in comparison. PBS has a video called Time: It’s Like, So Deep that talks about how to teach deep time to young students. I also found this interesting article: The benefits of deep time thinking by Richard Fisher for the BBC which includes three short films by Adam Proctor.
In geophysics, a time-depth conversion takes sound-wave velocity (time) data and converts it to depth. Sound waves move through different substances at different speeds. The conversion uses velocity models to account for variations in the speed of the waves. Understanding Time-Depth Conversion (from Seisware)
In oceanography, time-depth plots show salinity, density, temperature, and currents at a certain depth over time. Time-Depth Gridding (from NOAA)
Time Depth
In Merriam Webster, Time Depth is defined as: a period of time during which a culture, language, or group of languages has been undergoing independent genetic development.
Historical linguistics uses comparative methods of sound, shared core vocabulary, and typological features to trace languages through time.
