This week in a writer group chat, I mentioned Haruki Murakami’s famous–if strangely quiet–origin as a novelist. Murakami claims he saw a baseball player hit a double at a game and something inside him shifted–at that moment, he knew he was supposed to write a novel. My group chat exploded into writer origin stories of our own, all absolutely fake, yet fabulous.

Today write your speaker’s (faux) origin story as a poet. Of course, feel free to lean sincere if you’d like, exploring their history quietly. But I encourage you toward the strange, writing a speaker whose voice clicks into being at an unexpected moment. Murakami saw a baseball fly across the sky and everything changed. When and where will you locate your origin story? Is it a fixed event, a recurrence, or something else entirely?

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Erin Vachon is the Senior Reviews Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and the Multigenre + Chapbook Editor for Split/Lip Press. They are on the English Department Adjunct Faculty at Rhode Island College and live outside Providence, Rhode Island.