Butterfly going backwards
Alison Chisholm is impressed by a poem that reverses the life cycle of an insect
One of the questions writers hear most frequently is ‘where do your ideas come from?’ That’s seldom easy to answer. An idea tends to arrive not in isolation, but already linked to additional sources to the stimulus that prompted it. For poets and other writers of short pieces, the question is more intense, because brevity of genre means a greater number of different pieces, requiring more initial ideas. Lance Greenfield of Andover, Hampshire can identify multiple sources for his poem Flutter Back, one of which is firmly rooted in Writing Magazine. He’s a member of Andover Writers’ Circle, and recalls an exercise being set as a result of a story appearing in the magazine that described a person’s life going back from death bed to conception. The exercise was to write a piece of flash fiction reversing the process for a situation of choice, and Lance Greenfield’s effort met with enough approval for him to be prompted to turn the flash fiction into a poem – a transition that often works well.