But They’ve Seen It

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: Cryptids

When I was in grade school, I did a presentation on Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. I did a lot of research and found the theory that Nessie was a surviving Plesiosaurus fascinating. Of course, I also played in a ravine that I liked to imagine was a dinosaur path, so a surviving dino wasn’t a huge leap for me.

Most of the creatures studied by cryptozoologists are similarly explained: something thought to be extinct, or something that took a unique evolutionary path and somehow survived by hiding very well and staying away from humans. The majority of these creatures are thought to be impossible, and yet, people keep seeing them.

Being from the Pacific Northwest, I have a definite fondness for Bigfoot (or Sasquatch) the hairy ape man who roams our forests. But I think all tales of cryptids are fun.

OctPoWriMo

Every so often some critic announces that poetry is dead. As if centuries of oral and written traditions had a heart attack and couldn’t be resuscitated. Of course, they’re wrong, but someone will say it again anyway. In a way, poetry is a cryptid: an extinct creature that manages to survive in the wild by hiding from most people. But the people who discover it, are very adamant about its existence.

Example Poem: “Mother Talks Back to the Monster” by Carrie Shipers from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same.
When he says he’s seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real.
Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

~Carrie Shipers

Prompt: Remember your childhood monster. Did it emerge from the closet, or under the bed? What did it look like? What sounds did it make? What did it sound like? When did you grow out of it, or how did you overcome it? What would you talk about if you met it now?

Possible form: A narrative poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Eighteen 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.

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Music to get us moving: