Lindsey’s Writing Practice: FOCUS on the IMAGE

Posted: May 7, 2025 | Author: Lindsey Martin-Bowen | Filed under: Lindsey's Writing Practice, Writing | Tags: description, Image, Lindsey Martin-Bowen, Lindsey's Writing Practice, Writing to be Read | 4 Comments

FOCUS on the IMAGE

As many of you may have gleaned from last month’s exercise, the IMAGE remains essential to create captivating writing in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction works.

Then, you made descriptions more “concrete” by focusing on details. In a similar vein, an image must contain details using some or most of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste to make that image “hook” the reader.

Thus, for this month’s workshop, pull out a pen and one of your journals (or sheets of paper), and either close your eyes or look out a window (or depending upon the weather, venture outside). Closely study some IMAGE—something that “calls” you

Your image may suggest a location, for example, a Colorado, Oregon, New York, or Missouri scene without naming it: With a jutting cliff, a rosebud blossom, dogwood, or aspen bloom, a red leaf, a crow on a bare branch or a group of them on telephone lines, a hummingbird poking its long beak into a tulip bloom, or an eagle soaring above.

And AVOID abstractions: For this exercise, write “No ideas but in [concrete] things” (William Carlos Williams). Speaking of whom, here’s one of his well-known poems for inspiration:

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

your were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

About Lindsey Martin-Bowen

On Halloween 2023, redbat books released Lindsey Martin-Bowen’s 7th poetry collection, CASHING CHECKS with Jim Morrison. Her 4^th collection, Where Water Meets the Rock, was nominated for a Pulitzer; her 3rd, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison was a finalist in the QuillsEdge Press 2015-2016 Contest. In 2017, it won the Kansas Writers Assn award, “Looks Like a Million.” Writer’s Digest gave her “Vegetable Linguistics” an Honorable Mention in its 85th Annual (2017) Contest. Her Inside Virgil’s Garage (Chatter House Press 2013) was a runner-up in the 2015 Nelson Poetry Book Award. McClatchy Newspapers named her Standing on the Edge of the World (Woodley Press/Washburn University) one of the Ten Top Poetry Books of 2008. It was nominated for a Pen Award.

Her poems have run in numerous lit mags, including New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust, Coal City Review, Silver Birch Press, Flint Hills Review, The Same, Phantom Drift, Porter Gulch Review, Rockhurst Review, 21 anthologies. She taught lit & writing at UMKC & MCC 25 years, and taught law for Blue Mountain College in Pendleton, Oregon. She holds an MA from the U of Mo. and a JD degree from the UMKC Law School. Previously, she was reporter for The Louisville Times and The SUN Newspapers, an associate editor for Modern Jeweler Magazine and the editor for The National Paralegal Reporter.

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This segment of “Read and Cook” with Robbie Cheadle is sponsored by The Women in the West Adventure Series and WordCrafter Press.