COMP ETIT IONS COMP ETIT IONS

Each year, Tabula Rasa challenges the Pinewood community to a couple of competitions that allow students to explore their talents. This year, in addition to our typical two writing prompts, we included a prompt for art and photography submissions.

Write a haibun.

Japanese poet Matsui Bashō was famous for writing The Narrow Road of the Interior—a poetry collection about his travel journeys that heavily popularized the “haibun.” The haibun is a form of poetry that combines a prose poem and a haiku, and the haiku normally connects to the prose poem in a way that illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole—either by complementing or starkly juxtaposing the prose poem. Write a haibun inspired by what you saw while on a journey from one place to another.

2 Write a one-sentence story of at least 150 words.

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Time and time again, writers have broken conventional literary bounds regarding sentence length. Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship,” for example, is a one-sentence short story written in a stream-of-consciousness style that is more than 2,000 words. Write a one-sentence story of at least 150 words on any topic of your choosing.

3 Create a triptych.

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A triptych is a piece of artwork made up of three or more panels that often tells a narrative, creates a sequence, or shows different perspectives/elements of one subject matter. If you’re an artist, draw a triptych of a subject/object/thing of your choosing. If you’re a photographer, photograph three separate photos of any subject/object/thing that, when placed alongside each other, form a triptych.