Meatballs (writing prompts!)

And some inspiration from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

As always, we'll start with a quote. This is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in conversation with Adrienne Kennedy:

“My mother’s family is from Camden, Arkansas, and I spent basically every summer of my childhood there, with my grandparents, until they both passed. I’m always jealous of writers who have a kind of internal sense of place or write with a sense of place. Like, I have colleagues who write about Vermont, or Idaho, or Detroit, but I’ve never had that kind of thing in me. The space that lives most creatively inside of me is a place I never actually called “home,” so it always feels slightly like an imaginary place. Maybe that’s the same for you. I’ve basically set two plays near or around there. I somehow can access it when I’m writing more easily than I can access New York, where I’ve been living now for almost the entirety of my adult life. It’s just interesting, the way that certain places creep into your imaginative space. I grew up in Washington, D.C., but D.C. doesn’t live that way for me. Maybe it’s because the South—the senses are just activated in a different way. I still remember the specific natural details of my grandparents’ properties. But I don’t remember Washington, D.C., beyond my front porch.”

Today’s prompts were inspired by the movie Meatballs.