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Writing From The Inside Out

Next Read-Around is 10/9/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

Fairytales have an enduring appeal, especially those we entered as children while we were still building the architecture of our inner world. Once built, we decorated that architecture with retellings and new twists as we try to make sense out of our accumulated experiences. Shu Ting’s poem Fairy Tales describes the tendency to overlook the ailing trees and crumbling walls that indicate the architecture is failing while the tiny heart, overwhelmed by the world, holds on to the fairy tale in an immaculate distance somewhere over the rainbow.

But if widen and deepen the heart, we can invert the equation. The heart can then contain the world, with all its wonders and weirdness. The dying pine springs back to life after the rain. We see the ways the world touches itself: the a mulberry branch bends over water like a fishing rod or a cloud tangled in the tail of a kite. We create a new architecture for our stories—one in which the world is tiny and the heart’s enormous.

Fairy Tales

For Gu Cheng

You believed in your own story,
then climbed inside it –
a turquoise flower.
You gazed past ailing trees,
past crumbling walls and rusty railings.
Your least gesture beckoned a constellation
of wild vetch, grasshoppers, and stars
to sweep you into immaculate distances.

The heart may be tiny,
but the world's enormous.

And the people in turn believe —
in pine trees after rain,
ten thousand tiny suns, a mulberry branch
bent over water like a fishing rod,
a cloud tangled in the tail of a kite.
Shaking off dust, in silver voices
ten thousand memories sing from your dream.

The world may be tiny,
but the heart’s enormous.

—Shu Ting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_Ting
Translated from the Chinese by Donald Finkel

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a fairy tale you loved as a child. How does that story relate to your present life?

  2. Journal or write a poem describing a story you have climbed inside and lived it from the inside.

  3. Think of a time when you believed in your own story and it prevented you from seeing problems

  4. In the first stanza, Shu Ting nests the decay of everyday things in a cosmic landscape. In the third stanza, she does the opposite, nesting the tiny suns —the cosmic— in everyday things. Use a similar contrasting structure to compose your writing.

  5. Journal or write a poem about a time when your heart was tiny and the world seemed vast and a time when the world was tiny and your heart seemed vast.

  6. While outside in the world, take note of three to five things you see or hear that open your heart and three to five things that close your heart. Then, with those sights and sounds in mind, write about what heartens you and what disheartens you.

  7. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.