From Pieces and Parts

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗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.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Dismemberment

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein_(Aal) came out of the same challenge and party that the first Vampire story came out of. What a horrifying group of friends 👻. She tells the story of how a doctor created a body from pieces and parts of corpses and reanimated it with lightning. This story dredges up all of our universal fears: extinction (fear of death), mutilation (dismemberment), loss of autonomy (the monster is controlled by circumstances outside his control), separation (the monster is rejected), Ego-death (the monster experiences profound self-disapproval).

By hitting on all of the universal fears, Mary Shelley’s story may be speaking to the collective unconscious. The term collective unconscious was coined by Carl Jung and is the idea that the deepest part of our unconscious mind is inherited in our genes and does not come from personal experience. Jung believed this collective unconscious explains instinct (our sixth sense) and similar themes in mythologies around the world. I highly recommend taking a look at the book he edited, Man and His Symbols_(Aal).

As writers, we can create short-cuts to understanding using these universal connections. Symbology can help us quickly convey mood and theme and bring our readers to deeper meanings in our writing.

OctPoWriMo

There are many types of poems that “frankenstein” other texts. Blackout (or erasure) poetry and cut-up poems find poems by choosing words and phrases within prose. The Cento, combines lines from several other poems, making sure to reference each poem and poet at the end. The golden shovel takes a line of a poem and uses each word as the end word of each line in the new poem. Can you think of others?

Example Poem: “Pineola” by Sy Hoahwah from Poetry Foundation

Pineola

Severed finger of a convicted murderer uncurls like a waking pet.
Demonic compass points toward the most dangerous direction to get home.

Its long yellow fingernail can pick any lock.

On the fishhook, the finger resembles a long, fat mealworm.
Most times, it’s lodged in the throats of my enemies
or hiding among the tampons of cops’ wives.

It avoids gold rings, bad luck.

When wearing this rot relic on a chain,
sunlight smells like stale curtains in a worn-out hearse.
Rain never hits my clothes.

Rooms seem hotter.
Radios turn on by themselves, always to the same Lucinda Williams song.

Use any mirror as a doorway, I come out into the same sweaty
bedroom from a previous life. I forget who is wearing whom.

I pierce the fingertip to draw up a will.

I dip the finger in water. I point it toward the sun. I flick it to make it rain.

Hanging on the wall,
I sleep under this bird, booger-picker, dream catcher,
missing piece of an inverted crucifix, rotting pencil.

It sleeps over me like an accusative God.

Around midnight, I wake up, the finger is typing in the next room.
What is it composing at this time of night?

Letters to a parole board,
love letters to the rest of the hand,
midnight sermons,
ransom notes pertaining to me,
memoirs about life, hanging from my neck …

~ Sy Hoahwah

Prompt: Use one of the “frankenstein”-ing poetry forms to write a poem about a dismembered body part.

Possible form: Blackout poetry, cut-up poetry, cento, or golden shovel

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-three 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: