Creative Prompt #1

Leading up to the event we are offering weekly creative writing prompts drawn from across a range of Jones’s texts. Here’s the first one! Hold on to your response and share it during an experimental session called “Lightning Talks” on Day Two of the symposium! This session invites attendees to sign-up on a first-come first-serve basis to share 5 minutes or less of creative or critical reflections on the work and impact of Gayl Jones!

Image Description: Mosquito by Gayl Jones stands on a wooden table between two small cacti and behind a pile of bluish-purple flowers.

“But when new people came to work, she sat at this table, and she did this when I came to work there. She asked merely this question: What is your name, or what is the name you want to give? That was the only question she ever asked and the only thing she ever said to anyone. I remember that, because I had never been asked that by anyone. I am told that among certain guerilla groups that is the question they ask everyone. But I’d never been asked that question. Anyone who asked me my name always asked me my name to learn my true name. But to have someone tell me that I had the choice of telling my true name or only the name I wanted to give. 

What name did you give? I asked.”

–Mosquito by Gayl Jones, pp. 104-105

Our names signal many things such as agency, inheritance, borderlands, and genders. The names we give also withhold many more things. What constitutes the truth of a true name? When does the name you want to give shift or blur? 

Take five minutes to answer the question: “What name did you give?” and free-write the scene in which you gave this name. This scene can come from memory or you can write a new memory into being.

Image Description: Presenter Janet Arelis Quezada stands before a group of trees with pink flowers. Janet appears here as a brown-skinned woman wearing a white head wrap and white top, rectangular glasses, and a purple beaded bracelet. In Janet’s hands, she holds the book Mosquito by Gayl Jones which bears a lizard and a winged tire on its cover.