I share these prompts to encourage writers and creatives of all ages to journal uninhibitedly on a daily basis. No marketing, just prompts. 

Don’t feel compelled to spend days or even hours crafting the perfect response. Write, sketch, paint, or compose your response in words or colors, musical notes or dance interpretations, and then share it with the world, in all its raw beauty. 

If you do share your writing to the daily prompt, please feel free to leave a link in the comments or use the hashtag #RVWritingPrompts wherever you might be posting your response. 

Writing Prompt #5: Write, reflect, or create an original work on the most unconventional relationship you have ever experienced, past or present. You define what “unconventional relationship” means for your response, as this may be based on society’s rules, or yours. Regardless, to you: it is unconventional!

My Response: Prior to the world of global connectivity via the internet, my relationships were more about the environment in which I lived more than anything else. When I was growing up, it was all about our neighborhood – our street specifically. Schoolmates that were comparable in age but lived a few blocks away might as well have lived in another state. Neighborhoods were so territorial then, that when I dated a girl from “The Oaks” just about a quarter mile down Joppa Road, I was told by some bigger guy in that ‘hood that they were going to “introduce my face to my locker” in high school if I didn’t stop dating Donna.

Jets and Sharks kind of crazy stuff going on, even though I was not – nor was I ever – in a gang.

Later, when I began teaching and moved to Calvert County, my relationships were centered on Chesapeake Bay. I was so fortunate to teach several of Tom Clancy’s children, and so I spent time on the shores of Chesapeake and its tributaries talking about writing with the world’s bestselling writer at the time.

That connection would have never happened had I not been there, on the water, in that space.

Now, even though I am settled in Towson with my family and in Ellicott City with my students, some of my strongest relationships are with Jodi and Adam, two incredible human beings who just happen to live in Australia – a place I’ve never been, and two people I have never met “in real life.”

As much as I rail on the internet and technology (and if you don’t know that about me, give Fossil Five a good read and you’ll see where I stand on the digital world wiping away our human-to-human relationships), my relationship with Jodi and Adam is as close as any of the relationships I have known in Calvert County, Towson, or Ellicott City.

We connect through words, art, music in such a collaborative way that is stronger than any of the countless hours I spent on Chesapeake Bay sailing, or fishing the waters, or wading through low tide finding blue crabs shedding their shells for a good soft crab sandwich later that evening. What we have transcends all of that through mutual respect for each other as artists, individuals, and spiritual manifestations of something bigger that exists all around us.

Our 14- and sometimes 16-hour time differences are perfect for working on each other’s drafts, or mulling over ideas to be shared over our “even-morns.”

In this unconventional relationship, somebody is always awake, watching over our words, pondering art and life and the world that spins so wildly around us.

But it is one world, and we are held together by the unconventional bond we have created regardless if the world tilts off its axis every once in a while. Like the pull of the moon, we ebb and flow this journey together, having never met, and never having to.