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 hexunge) 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.
Writober 2025: Day Thirty-one Halloween>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 31 of Writober: Happy Halloween
It’s the end of another Writober. Congratulations to everyone who participated. This month has been quite a journey. Thank you for sharing your poems, stories, and pictures. I enjoyed them all. What a great way to share the Halloween Spirit.
Now for my final creations to send you off into this Halloween Night.
OctPoWriMo
Halloween Lives (in the squirrels)
Tonight the streets will fill with monsters each mask coloring history’s sins: impostors begging and threatening where the unknown wanders under porchlights’ glow
After each of our fears embodied comes alive we’re sorted into those who thrive and who hide As the hours slip through darker things show darker sides treats run out, leaving tricksters
But true demons aren’t the eggers or armed with toilet paper not even the goblins that smash the pumpkins are as depraved as the one that returns day after day and nibbles and scrapes at a jack-o-lanterns face
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Muddy Footprints
Beatrice was so sick of the gardener coming in the house and muddying up her clean floors. He seemed to think his work was more important, and she could just rewash the floors, as if her efforts and time had no value. Her frustration and anger grew every single day. Even during a drought he managed to have mud on his shoes, and from the smell it wasn’t always only mud. The man was a menace.
The ghost of the lady of the house had been coming to the end of her bed at night. She had always liked the lady of the house. Her sudden disappearance had been explained as a mishap, a fall from the cliff where she liked to walk to clear her mind. But the nightly visitations had convinced Beatrice that there may have been foul play.
Beatrice shared her frustrations with the mistress who nodded, but she was always nodding. Her head appeared to be almost severed from the back, but Beatrice ignored that and took the nodding as commiseration.
On Halloween when the veil was thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead, Beatrice saw the mistress in the glass of the door as she mopped the floor. The gardener must not have seen her. He appeared to walk right through her as he stomped into the room, but he only made a couple muddy steps before his eyes went wide; he gasped and grabbed his chest then fell flat on his face on her shiny, clean floor.
Beatrice smiled and clapped a couple of times, she hummed a tune she had never heard before as she went to work making it look like he tripped and hit his head. The floor was wet, she had been mopping, after all, and he never watched his step.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photographs I wanted to revisit a couple of the filters I cut this month that I really enjoyed.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
And another Writober has come to an end. I hope these daily writing and photography challenges have gotten you into a daily creativity habit that you will continue into the fall and winter. The prompt posts will continue to be available so come back any time to visit the ones you missed, or want to try again.
As humans we all move toward pleasure and away from pain. It is part of our physical make up to be motivated by survival and avoid danger and death. So when it comes to exploring our deepest fears, we are working against our nature. If we want to write deeply and explore our deepest fears, we need to convince ourselves we are safe, and that memories and imagination cannot hurt us.
We need to tell the voices from childhood that make up the reactionary rules of our subconscious, that we thank them for the work they did to protect us when we needed them, but now we don’t need them anymore. Writing is about living with our deepest fears every day. Facing our deepest fears doesn’t end on Halloween but is part of our writing practice with every word we choose to put on the page.
OctPoWriMo
Here we are, Halloween. Congratulations!! I hope you’ve felt inspired and had a lot of fun.
Standing above her open coffin, within that pestilent place, he stared at her colorless corpse and stared at her lovely face.
Sensing a sense of accusation, “Leave us alone,” he said, and the others left the mausoleum and left him with the dead.
He placed his hand at the top of her gown and broke the clasps apart, staring down at the purple scar above her silent heart.
Then he bolted the lid, locked the door, and saw in the lightning’s light three ghouls who craved her rotting flesh in the blackness of the night.
Maggots who dig up and eat the dead in the pits of no-man’s-land, who scented the scent of the newly-dead, who lunged and scratched his hand.
But he smashed them back with his walking stick, and they staggered from the shock, then slithered away from the dead one’s tomb, as he double-checked the lock.
But waiting near the graveyard gate, under the hemlock tree, a seductive vampyr smiled and said, “Come away with me.”
He saw the fangs and famished eyes of the tempting whore of pain, who swiftly moved into his path and touched his jugular vein.
But he lifted a hand of garlic flowers, and the creature jerked and hissed into the winds of the coming storm and vanished in the mist.
At the edge of town, he saw the monster nearing the torch-lit gate, looking for its human god, looking for its mate.
Enraged by the thunder’s thunder, it stepped away from its place, but calmly he grabbed the flaming torch and burned its ugly face.
Later he heard the werewolves howl, up along the ridge, as suddenly they blocked his path before the wooden bridge.
Ravenous, they moved to strike, but it was far too late; he lifted up a silver bullet, then his .38.
He fired at the alpha-wolf, hitting the vicious gray and blowing apart its little brain as the others ran away.
Nearing his gate, he saw the daemon, but never broke his stride, and when it saw his hollow eyes, it nodded, and stepped aside.
At last, the storm fell from the night, as he entered the house of pain, it fell in torrents, flashed and crashed, and pounded sheets of rain.
Upstairs he found the silent ghost sitting alone, undressed, with the sharp and bloodless knife protruding from her chest.
Being the one he’d just entombed, his daughter, the jilted bride, who’d come back home to nothing but a shocking suicide.
The specter pointed at her heart, but he stared across the room, into the mirror, into his eyes, each an empty tomb.
No wonder the creatures had cowered away, and surely they were right, those predators of human flesh, those vermin of the night.
For they could only murder the body, the part but not the whole, but he was a far more deadly thing: the assassin of his soul.
The storm fell down from the blackest night, over the house of pain, the torrents flashed and thunder-crashed and pounded the slashing rain.
~William Baer
Prompt: Write a narrative poem about a Halloween Night.
Possible Form: Quatrain stanzas with an XAXA rhyme scheme, or Freeverse.
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Prompt: Take a picture of your favorite thing about Halloween.
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Thirty Eldritch Horror>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 30 of Writober: Fear From Out of Space
OctPoWriMo
The Slip Over the Edge
Tentacles of multi- dimensional reach ancient elusive dark where time and space tear the explorer must mind his mind or find it lost in eternal spirals of deepening madness helpless solitary lost the logical in battle with the illogical the known engulfed by the unknowable recruiting the possible to convince the masses of the impossible amoral unfeeling giant the senses are use- less when encountering the incomprehensible slithering around the cranial folds while in deep space and occupying an island only discovered by the shipwrecked
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Fear Feeders
The car stopped suddenly and our neighbor screamed, “Get out! Get out now!” Perry and I were so confused we just looked at each other. Our neighbor got out of the car which he left running, grabbed our bags out of the trunk and threw them in the ditch under a sign that said, “Don’t Feed the Fears,” on a post of a barbed-wire fence around a dead and dried up field. The pastel lights danced in the sky over the field, touching down then rising again.
We got out and fetched our bags. “How would you even feed a fear?” I yelled after our neighbor as he drove off at high speed. Once he was out of sight we looked at each other. “Why did he do that, Perry?”
“I don’t know. It must have been the fears. What are we going to do?”
“What if no one else comes along? This place looks completely deserted. There’s nothing out here.”
“What if we can’t find any food or water?”
“What if the fears are everywhere, and there’s nowhere to go?”
With each question the lights got brighter and closer.
“Perry, I’m scared.”
“Me, too.” Perry pulled his sunglasses from his bag.
“Dang, I forgot mine. I’m afraid I’m going to go blind. Why is the light getting so bright? Do you hear it whispering? Perry? Perry? Where are you?”
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photographs I decided to finish yesterday’s idea: I finished cutting the third filter, then cut all three filters in three moveable sections then folded and combined them in different ways until I came up with an eldritch horror that would cause madness if ever encountered.
🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses) 🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography 🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes. 🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” ~William Shakespeare Hamlet(Aal)(Act 1, Scene 5)
Our deepest fear, after we have faced every fear and conquered or made friends with it, is one that we can never know. That is why poetry is never dead no matter what anyone says, there is always something more to explore that cannot be answered. We can say that fear is what happens to our thinking mind that defines us after we die, or it can be what is going on in all the simultaneous dimensions we aren’t experiencing, or it can be the ever present question, Do we have free will? What it all adds up to is The unknown.
Though in Lovecraftian horror these creatures from the unknown cause madness in their witnesses, as writers we see the unknown as the playground of the imagination. Yes, write what you know in terms of exploring sensory details and imagery. Then use those specific details of experience to describe the surprising or even the impossible. Compare and contrast known sensory experiences with those life-changing events that can’t be explained. Take the leap from the daily mundane that everyone can relate to, to those fantastic moments that we can barely believe happened even though we experienced them.
This year, James Wyman of Burlington Writers Workshop is offering a poetry 101 course, for free. When he sent out the syllabus he recommended we read Perrine’s Sound and Sense(Aal). It’s a wonderful, intense “Introduction to Poetry,” and I wish I had read it years ago. The title is from a poem called Sound and Sense by Alexander Pope.
A poet has a full tool box to for commanding the sounds of language to imbue each line with mystery and emotion. The work of the poet is to use these tools to match sound and sense: to make the poem sing with its meaning.
The oaks shone gaunt gold on the lip of the storm before the wind rose, the shapeless mouth opened and began its five-hour howl; the lights went out fast, branches sidled over the pitch of the roof, bounced into the yard that grew black within mintes, except for the lightning—the landscape bulging forth like a quick lesson in creation, then thudding away. Inside, as always, it was hard to tell fear from excitement: how sensal the lightning’s poured stroke! and still, what a fire and a risk! As always the body wants to hide, wants to flow toward it—strives to balance while fear shouts, excitement shouts, back and forth—each bolt a burning river tearing like escape through the dark field of the other.
~Mary Oliver
How do the sounds of these words in these lines convey the meaning of the poem?
Prompt: Think of the onset of a specific fear. Write a poem using short, punchy phrases to express the immediacy and speed for which we feel fear.
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Writober 2025: Day Twenty-nine Other-worldly>Response Post
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges 🐦⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 29 of Writober: Other-worldly Monsters
OctPoWriMo
Codependency
What good is gravity when at any time a bright light be it blue, eerie green, or white can shine down from over our beds or through the trees in a dark wood or over a lonely mountain road and it, gravity, has no power at all to hold our bodies to the earth doesn’t put up a bit of fight against the beam of light collapses in awe of the other-worldly and lets it, the beam, suck us up into the hull of some far-traveling, hovering object semi-disguised as a cumulus cloud until it reveals itself and strikes? And why so rude, really, these travelers completely disrespecting our gravity that perhaps we take for granted but in a cozy, familiar, loving way most of the time: I mean, we need it like we need clean water . . . Well, maybe not the best example Probably why the travelers come: they either want our water, or want to warn us that polluting our water is leading to global destruction. Either way they’re going to be disappointed. Seems like a waste of time and resources to travel to distant planets and disrespect their planetary forces to abduct and scold random people. But it does beg the question: Is this relationship with gravity misplaced energy that will only lead to heartbreak?
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Gravity’s Mistress
At this point Sharon wished she had never created an anti-gravity machine. The university had sold it to the highest bidder which was a tech giant that sold it as a mass-market gizmo: a toy for the rich and famous. And of course, with all the money from the sale, the university now attracted the brats of the rich and famous. Without fail, during her office hours she would end up floating around her office with her books and papers fluttering about mid-air while some snickering undergrad with gravity boots looked up her skirt. Why did she keep wearing dresses to work? They called to her when she shopped. She liked lace and frills. She liked to feel pretty. And shopping was about the only thing that kept her mind off of her regrets.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s photos I started out thinking about the exquisite corpse game and making filters that could intertwine, but ended up thinking about what might evolve on other planets and came up with these other-worldly ideas.
