GRWM— featuring Kerry Donoghue
Issue #15
GRWM (Get Ready With Me) is a new (and dare I say sexy!) segment where I'll be interviewing writers retro-style-- cute little questionnaires about what writers are wearing, listening to, snacking on, etc. We want to know what they're into and what gives them the ick. We want writing prompts based on their books. We want to know their favorite song, the worst writing advice they've ever received, and you better believe we want to know their brunch order.
It's time to stop asking writers the same boring questions and start getting REAL.
Kerry Donoghue's poetry and stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Painted Bride Quarterly, Permafrost, The Louisville Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. She also wrote The Loudest Voice of All, a children’s book, to fundraise for an organization that educates girls about the power of voting. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. And she’s a fiction alum for the 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator. You can find her in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family. Get to know her at www.kerrydonoghue.com.
WRITE IT OUT
Choose an excerpt from your book, Mouth, and give us a prompt based on the work.
MOUTH features 10 short stories themed around our American obsession with consumption and the different ways we hurt each other, and ourselves, with our mouths. Who are we when we hunger?
Excerpt from “Jenny”
My routine steadies me. First, I set the space heater to seventy-seven degrees and clip a travel fan to the toilet paper holder. Once the bathroom feels balmy, I scatter the tub with fistfuls of landscaping sand.
After that, I need a solid ten minutes to ease into the bathtub. It’s not easy maneuvering alone. I’m built like a seal, though not as lithe. Add the athletic bandages swathing me thigh to ankle, plus two yards of seafoam green tulle layered around that, and I can’t rush. But oh, the luxury in limitation. Once I’m situated, there’s nothing to do but admire my long sparkling practice tail. Sapphire dorsal, turquoise underside. And two scalloped clam shells giving my chest its best life. There I am, glittering under the wan bathroom light. Alone, but illuminated. The real me, without acne-pitted cheeks or springtime allergies or a reliance on my feet to get around. In the water, I am ablaze.
My real tail has been hanging in the bedroom closet for the past year like the promise of a wedding dress. And, like a bride, I haven’t shown anyone what’s inside the garment bag yet. Instead, I’ve been elbow-deep in sequins most evenings, stitching glittering scales into a pattern inspired by parrotfish. I knocked out the final row last night, only to find myself in tears. It’s all within reach.
On days when I feel like I’m nothing more than a slug sliming across a straw doormat, I slip into my tail and flap gently in front of my bedroom mirror. Maybe rest my hands on my hips, posing like the Jenny Haniver nailed above my bed. To most people, Jenny’s just an old, dried stingray, folded to look like a seductress with a tail. Kitsch from a bygone era, a lie hand-fashioned by sailors hoping to impress loved ones once they returned home. But to me, she’s more than that. The impossible made possible, she always says. A lighthouse marking my horizon, assuring me that I’m close. So close.
With an indulgent flick, like I’m taunting an armada, I slip under.
***
Truth be told, I’ve never seen the ocean. Born and bred on a sunflower farm outside Topeka, I know all about the choking expanse of earth and sky. The curse of solitude and land. I know exactly how you can suffocate from too much air.
Though the day-to-day of my life is swept up in the concrete tsunami of Los Angeles, the very beach I dream of just a quick drive away, I’ve never once touched the sand. And I’ve been here in Culver City three years now. Instead, I let gridlock and hookah bars and rundown donut shops be a breakwater against the reality I’ve been too scared to face. Because what if it’s not as good as I imagined? Or worse, what if it is?
My roommate has no idea I mermaid. Marie and I met when, in a boldness fueled by some fancy Chardonnay a client had gifted me, I advertised my spare bedroom online, hopeful I’d make a new friend. Marie was the only one who responded to my ad. When we met for boba, she showed up with a Big Gulp and said, “It’ll be more of a crash pad situation, you know?” I appreciated that. It’s not often people show you who they really are.
PROMPT
Find the valley between who your character pretends to be and who they really are. This is where their secret hunger hides, and it’s a prime place to trawl for tension. So plunge deep. Start by writing a scene where your character is alone—maybe they’re in a gas station bathroom, the supply room at work, or their ex’s kitchen at midnight. What’s the first thing they do when no one’s looking? How is it different from what they do in public? Surface this tension through the things they consume. What do they collect, wear, eat, or drink to help (or hinder) their goal? What are they starving for? What about you?
Don’t Miss This!
This is the Place: Mapping Memory and Home in Regional Writing with Kristen Arnett
Date: Sunday, June 8, 2025
Time: 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EST)
Duration: 2 hours
Location: Live on Zoom
Writing about place and home that has "main character syndrome.”
Dorothy Allison once wrote that “Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” Part of writing regionally means discovering the things that you thought you knew about your memory and perception are colored and distorted by the environment that shaped you. In regional writing, setting is key. How is home constructed in place narrative? Through application of all five senses? Does it require thinking of place as character? Attendees will spend time in this session discussing the craft of place and regional writing in narrative works, essays, and pop culture/media. This will be a collaborative process; one that allows us to consider (and reconsider) questions of “home” when it comes to creative work. Readers will generate work in-session and take home prompts when the workshop is complete.
What you will learn
To hone the craft of writing place scenes
To hone the craft of reading place scenes
To explore the nuances and intersections of how "home" works in various types of creative writing and in pop culture/media
Workshop takeaways
Students will leave with generated work, further reading, further writing prompts, and a better sense of how to read/write place and home in regional work
Additional info
This workshop will be recorded for the convenience of those unable to attend live. The recorded session will be emailed to participants the following day.