Friday SPAM poetry prompt #928

SPAM prompt line: Mrs. Brown has never given an interview about her family.

If you have a curious nature (and it certainly helps to have one if you’re a writer), this prompt line should raise a flurry of questions on sight. Who is this Mrs. Brown? What is her family like? Why would there be any notion of her “giving an interview” in the first place–how many mothers are contacted for interviews, even in this media-rich age? Why has she never given an interview (i.e., did she refuse when asked)? Who’s asking her to do so, and why?

Or maybe the point here is, Mrs. Brown is too common, too uninteresting for anyone to care about an interview involving her and her brood. How uninteresting is her life–what else has she never done? How has it shaped her (or not)? Is she as neutral as her name suggests?

You have a lot of options with this prompt. You don’t have to have literally known a “Mrs. Brown” by name; she can be someone you’d like to examine through the viewfinder created by the prompt line. Or you can create a character based on the answers you provide to the questions this prompt line inspires.

You can even make the poem about you, i.e., “I’ve never given an interview about my family.” Are you glad, sorry, relieved you haven’t? Would you like to? What would you say? What might you reveal that your family would rather you kept quiet about? You could also take the “I’ve never…but I have…” approach.

You can also use first person to write a persona poem.

Lots of possibilities.  Happy writing!

–Nancy 

P.S. Often SPAM subject lines lift directly from news stories, so this line may refer to an actual interview with an actual person. For all I know, it’s taken from a story about the mother of Nicole Brown Simpson. If you’re really the curious sort, you could Google it and find out.

You can find more poetry prompts here.