Screams in the Night

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🔗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.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Harbingers of Death

I remember reading once that ducks are harbingers of death. Living on a lake, I see death omens everywhere 🦆💀. What animals or symbols come up for you as death omens. I like the word harbinger. However, if I hear shrieking and wailing in the night, and see some ghostly woman floating over the dark water, I might take that omen seriously.

Though the banshees’ screams are said to predict a death in the family, letting out a good primal scream can be very freeing and make you feel alive. Give it a try. Let loose. Scream and wail with your whole being. Now that you’ve freed your voice, what will you do with it?

OctPoWriMo

The voice of a poem is the style and perspective that a specific poet brings to her work. Each of us bring our unique voice to our poems which includes all of the choices that we make: the words, the line breaks, the stanza breaks, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. The more we write, the clearer our voice becomes.

In Tony Hoagland’s The Art of Voice_(Aal), he talks about distance as part of voice. One way to draw the reader close is to use apostrophe or specific address. He uses the example, “Listen, Daisy.” Who might you address directly in your poem?

Example Poem: “Apparition” by Mark Doty from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection_(Aal)

Apparition

I’m carrying an orange plastic bucket of compost
down from the top of the garden—sweet dark,

fibrous rot, promising—when the light changes
as if someone’s flipped a switch that does

what? Reverses the day. Leaves chorusing,
dizzy. And then my mother says

—she’s been gone more than thirty years,
not her voice, the voice of her in me—

You’ve got to forgive me. I’m choke and sputter
in the wild daylight, speechless to that:

maybe I’m really crazy now, but I believe
in the backwards morning I am my mother’s son,

we are at last equally in love
with intoxication, I am unregenerate,

the trees are on fire, fifty-eight years of lost bells.
I drop my basket and stand struck

in the iron-mouth afternoon. She says
I never meant to harm you. Then

the young dog barks, down by the front gate,
he’s probably gotten out, and she says,

calmly, clearly, Go take care of your baby.

~Mark Doty

What images does the poet use to express his “crazy” feeling?

Prompts: Imagine a ghost appearing to you while you were doing something you enjoy doing. How would you react? What would you say? What would the spirit say to you? Use sensory imagery to express your sudden change in mood.

Possible form: Speak the poem first – use a tape recorder and just speak until you get all your ideas recorded. Listen back and write down the best lines to form your poem.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Sixteen Image

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.

Music to get us moving: