I never told you this, but the day after my mother died, I ate her unfinished red velvet birthday cake. The whole of it. ~ Evelyn Krieger

A strangely thrilling collaborative writing exercise

Hello, hello, friends.

Please enjoy this strange, extraordinary, affecting collage-style piece constructed (well, sort of, anyway) in the tradition of an Exquisite Corpse during our recent Writing in the Dark Live Salon on Zoom. Thank you to the thirty or so writers who joined us—we spent a marvelous 40 minutes together in creative collaboration.

To note, all of the sentences contained in this collage-style piece, including the title of the post, were written by different writers at different times during the course of our still-ongoing Story Challenge exercises. None of these sentences were meant to go together.

Or so we thought.

As my mentor Paul Matthews writes about in his craft book, Sing Me The Creation, twelfth-century troubadours in the South of France played a literary question and answer game called the jeu-parti—the divided game.

“From this root comes our English word ‘jeopardy,’” Paul says. “What a marvelous root. That in the midst of word play we might be confronted by a rea…