"A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas

Read the well-loved holiday prose poem here.

Hear the author read it here.


Notice how he begins his journey into the Christmases of his childhood, not by methodically detailing his infancy and plodding forward year by year, and not by agonizing over whether he's remembering every little thing in the right way; he knows he isn't:

"One Christmas was so much like the other. . .  that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."

Instead, he does this:

 "I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come . . . " (You either know the end of this sentence by heart, or you should go ahead and read the text.)

Try something like this yourself. Instead of thinking about structure, plot, suspense, scene-building, or any of the other things we've discussed in past exercises, just follow your memories where they lead you.

Pick a number from 1 to 50 and click here for a prompt. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and write down whatever comes to you, without trying to censor, order, or even make sense of it. You might be surprised to find that, like a dream, it will have its own structure and make its own strange and surprising kind of sense.