Image 1 of 15
Image 2 of 15
Image 3 of 15
Image 4 of 15
Image 5 of 15
Image 6 of 15
Image 7 of 15
Image 8 of 15
Image 9 of 15
Image 10 of 15
Image 11 of 15
Image 12 of 15
Image 13 of 15
Image 14 of 15
Image 15 of 15
The story behind this year’s Camp
This summer I jumped continents. With no real plan, I let the path carry me. I surrendered to the journey, becoming a true traveler again.
The path has led me to cities across Europe – even suburbs – I never anticipated, where I encountered things like:
A potato vending machine on the outskirts of Prague
Copenhagen’s local jazz scene tucked behind tightly closed wooden doors
Nighttime crowds spilling from the Spätis of Leipzig and Berlin, sitting cross-legged on sidewalks, legs dipping into bike lanes and streets
These settings became the backdrop for unexpected crossings with characters both new and familiar – moments that pressed themselves into every part of me:
Lunch in an apple orchard with my ex’s daughter, where we exchanged words after eight years
A twilight bike ride through a candlelit cemetery to visit the father of someone, who in that moment, imprinted himself more deeply into me
Speaking someone’s portrait aloud across a table and letting that deep looking dissolve a two-decade age gap into a nine-day romance across two cities
I got so far from the path I thought I’d take this summer that the extremity taught me two things:
The magic that can happen when I slow with someone or something that I didn’t think I had the urge to
The clarity of knowing what I’ll say no to at all costs. (That “no” was what put me on that unexpected path in the first place – the thing that caused me to jump onto a new wave and ride it.)
In the end – which I am finally near – I have found an appreciation for things I previously thought I had no taste for. I have let go of ideas of how I thought things should be and opened my eyes more fully to what is.
And I have fallen in love. Again and again and again. With all the heart-opening beauty of life that, really, is available to us in every moment. In every landscape. Even in the suburbs.
Life has moved rapidly these past three months, and I’ll keep unpacking it back home in Mexico – in my writing, as I always do. And this time, I’ll do it alongside you in this year’s Writing Camp.
This year’s prompts come directly from my travels – drawn from the places, scenes, and encounters that have felt the most alive. They’re sentence scraps extracted from moments I have actually lived. But they are also ones that feel universal, designed to awaken the particular stories that live inside you.
Travel has the power to undo and remake us. But the truth is, whether we ever leave home or not, we’re always traveling – colliding into things. Making contact with people, places, moments that leave their mark.
Maybe packing a bag and setting off gets you so far away from what’s familiar that it helps you notice this more – helps you to feel your life more deeply. But writing does this too. It makes you slow with your moments. Live them down to the dust in the shaft of sunlight.
The prompts are designed for this – to wake you up to your moments, your memories, your fiction fantasies. They take whatever is around you or inside you and snap it to attention.
How I wrote this year’s prompts:
Every time I journey you over a series of prompts, a rough picture forms in my mind. It feels like writing a connect-the-dots novel, for you to fill in the gaps. I see characters drifting in and out of scenes, brief interactions where something shifts. There are flashes of turning points, vivid landscapes, then a fade to black that leaves space for your story to surface. I sense many possibilities radiating out from these gathering points. And each of these gathering points becomes a prompt.
Normally, I just start writing and the prompts flow, just like sitting down to do any type of writing. But this year, I began differently.
I mapped each place I visited and let the memories flood back – images, scents, sounds. Each chapter of the journey sparked prompts through a different sense: some visual, some sound-based, some tied to light, patterns, or recognition.
Then I played with the order – breaking apart the timeline, rearranging the dots to form a loose arc. The final sequence feels like a story in itself. As you write, this allows a larger narrative to take shape across the prompts, if it is there to emerge. Or you may find connection points across random prompts, linking them in unexpected ways.
Or not.
Because each prompt is its own turning point, it’s also meant to stand alone – the spark of an entirely new piece. You might leave camp with 21 distinct works in 21 different forms: short story, memory, character sketch, poem, list, word association, song… words have endless ways of arranging themselves.
The prompts are just meant to activate something. And they always do. Trust that whatever arrives is the story that’s been waiting for you. So take up your pen and draw it forth.
This camp feels especially alive this year, and I am excited to write along with you.