Prompt #8 Love and Loss

February

Hi Friends,

For this last prompt about love and loss, we are going to play with the epistolary form, meaning a story told in letters, diary entries, telegrams (the olden days) and more recently, emails and text messages.

Some espistolary novels you might be familiar with include The Sorrows of Young Werther, Frankenstein, Dracula (this form was big in the 18-19th centuries) and more recently, The Color Purple. It can also be used in nonfiction and memoir, as in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Gayle Brandeis’ beautiful memoir The Art of Diagnosis (one of her threads consists of letters from the narrator to her mother and another thread is composed of transcripts from her mother talking about her own art). The deal in memoir, though, is that you can include YOUR letters but if you include someone else’s letters or even text messages, you must get permission since that’s considered their intellectual property. But you are free to write and publish your own letters! 

So to finish off February’s theme, we are going to write a letter that tells a story of love lost.