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: Death Rituals
Ancient Egyptians preserved their dead through dramatic procedures, leaving fascinating mummies for us to find thousands of years later. The dead were so well preserved it lead to stories of them rising and walking the Earth. The Egyptian rituals were meant to prepare their kings for the afterlife and provide them with what they will need in the hereafter.
Every culture has death rituals in which we honor our dead, but these rituals are more for the living than for preparing the dead for the afterlife. The one’s left behind by death are the ones who feel grief from the loss. We need rituals to face death and keep living. Exploring death rituals of different cultures and religious beliefs can show us how people face their deepest fears.
You might find some inspiration in this 360°museum tour of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
OctPoWriMo
Rituals help us see death in terms of what it is not: It is not an ending but a passage to something different and new, something better and easier. Though this month is about exploring our deepest fears and for most living things the deepest of our deep fears is death, rituals are how we keep that fear at a distance even when it is in front of us.
Example Poem: “Our Fear” by Zbigniew Herbert from All Poetry
Our Fear
Our fear
does not wear a night shirt
does not have owl’s eyes
does not lift a casket lid
does not extinguish a candle
does not have a dead man’s face either
our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
‘warn Wójcik
the place on Dluga Street is hot’
our fear
does not rise on the wings of the tempest
does not sit on a church tower
it is down-to-earth
it has the shape
of a bundle made in haste
with warm clothing
provisions
and arms
our fear
does not have the face of a dead man
the dead are gentle to us
we carry them on our shoulders
sleep under the same blanket
close their eyes
adjust their lips
pick a dry spot
and bury them
not too deep
not too shallow
~Zbigniew Herbert
What does using the inclusive “our” do in this poem?
Prompt: Using rituals and ritualistic actions, describe a fear—a specific fear, or fear in general—in terms of what it is not.
Possible form: Etheree
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
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:
Experience Writing 
OctPoWriMo Day 22. We Do This Every Day
~ Oizys.
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YES! “Well Preserved” & “Deepest Fears”! My kind of Halloween fun! 🎃
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Glad you came by.
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