Sere: A Creative Prompt

The first creative meditation from Fran Gardner...

I’m happy to introduce a new voice today on Juke. Fran Gardner writes Becoming, where she explores her surroundings, discusses her creative practice, and shares her poetry. She has also been a valuable member of Juke’s readership for a while. So, when she approached me recently about contributing to Juke, I was excited to share with her an idea I’d been contemplating.

I have been wanting to integrate prompts onto the page. I know how valuable they can be for my own writing. And I had already noticed Fran’s talent for making surprising connections and threading together her observations and intuitions. Each time I open one of her pieces, I come away with a spark of inspiration. When she wrote to me, I suggested she could do the same for Juke—write creative prompts in order inspire our readers in their own drawing, journaling, poetry, composing, (etc. etc.)

Fran’s first creative prompt for our readers is below. It’s a kind of creative guided meditation, centered on the word “Sere”. After you read, give yourself a few minutes to consider the word and the images it has stirred for you. I hope it inspires you the way it inspires me.
—Tonya M

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photo by Fran Gardner

Sere

A very dry word

Sere, a word more commonly found in poetry than in conversation, has a meaning beyond arid. It’s sometimes spelled “sear,” but I like “sere.” It sounds drier.

Sere denotes a landscape of nothingness, windblown, sand-scoured, dry, lifeless, baking under a merciless sun. Or a landscape of cold, carved into the bones of earth by ice and snow.

Sere is one way of describing the hollowed-out feeling that is the nadir of grief. It is the soul with all emotion scrubbed away, too empty to feel, too afraid of the raw pain. Exhausted, unfruitful, abandoned.

Color

The color of sere is the color of the desert. You wear ochre, or brown, black, tan or taupe, the weeds of the seeker.

You must seek from the beginning, in a landscape made new without water.

You taste the dryness, grit in your mouth, sand in your nostrils, rough and alien, yet also as clean as mourning.

Between your fingers, more grit. This is the element, the earth scoured for you.

Sounds

Now, what do you hear? The wind, screaming over the blackened plain. The whisper, creeping into your ear while ghostly fingers trace your grieving features.

Your name, your hopes, your essence, spoken in a roar or a whisper.

More questions

Where is the light? Stark sun bearing down upon you. Dusk that would cast a long shadow if there were anything here to create one. Night with its cloak of stillness. Dawn, breaking the night, breaking your silence.

Breaking your heart.

Why are you here? This place can be both outpost and sanctuary. It is the acre of your nightmare. It is the cave of your comfort.

You are hot here. Or you are cold. Where is your relief? Where is your strength?

Relief

Perhaps rain has come, the merest drizzle. Points of water pockmark that barren ground, deepening the colors of the landscape. They run together, like the strands of your soul, braiding and pooling…

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Read more from Fran at Becoming….

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