Image: Ocean of Tears by Rin Yu (from issue 63.2, Spring 2025).
PRISM Prompts is a treasure chest full of muses, wonderings, and inspiration for both seasoned writers who are itching for a new approach to their craft and new writers who are looking for a place to get started, somewhere outside of the blank page. Turn the key, lift the lid, and look inside. Take whatever shines the brightest or the strangest, bring it home with you, and write.
I’m fascinated by love: the concept, the practice, the aesthetic. I find myself drawn to the philosopher Empedocles, who maintained that Love and Strife are the two fundamental governing forces in the universe. I suspect that love truly is at the bottom of everything: that we need love in order to have freedom, and that love itself requires freedom (the two are mutually entailing). I could go on about that forever, but instead I’ll try to focus here on one aspect of the literary tradition involving love: the love letter. From the ancient world to the modern one, aesthetic expressions of love have remained a consistent part of global artistic practices.
My personal definition of what constitutes a love letter is intentionally ambiguous: poems, songs, playlists/mixtapes, prose, portraiture – any of these can take the shape of a love letter. Love letters can be directed at an individual, a homeland, a community, an idea, etc. But I do think that perhaps they all involve an element of direct address: created by an “I” to be received by a “you” (where these pronouns might transcend the personal), whether or not they are ever sent.
Prompt: Write a non-traditional “love letter” incorporating the idea of freedom (whatever that means to you) as it relates to the object of your affectation. Here are some additional suggestions to get your creativity flowing:
- Start by deciding who or what you want to address in your “love letter”.
- Make a playlist of ten songs that evoke the feelings you want to express. If you’re writing about a homeland, for instance, consider including some songs from that land.
- As you listen to the playlist, write down five words that stand out to you from each song. Try to pick a good mix of nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
- Now you have a word bank of 50 words! Start by selecting one or two from the list and write a line that incorporates them. What images or associations do those words bring up for you? Write them down and see where they take you.
- In the next line, write down your personal definition of “freedom”. Ask yourself whether the object of your love makes you feel more or less free, and how?
- As you continue to free-write, return to your list and pick more words to incorporate. You don’t have to get through them all, but try to use at least 20 words from your list.
Some additional considerations/challenges for this prompt:
- Write your love letter without using the word love.
- Think about the shape of your love letter. Does your love make you feel round, square, flowing, static, etc.? How does that affect your line breaks or spacing?
- No matter who or what you’re writing to, use “I” and “you” to speak directly to them in your love letter.
- Make your poem tactile. Emotions do not exist outside of sensation, so what are the physical sensations of your love? What does your love taste, smell, look, sound like? What is its texture?
I hope this prompt inspires you to take love out of abstraction and into embodiment! Maybe you’ll end up with a love letter that your love will never see, but you will see your love mirrored back to you on the page. Or maybe… you’ll write something that you want to share: a piece of your heart on paper for someone else to hold.
With love (and freedom, ’cause they’re the same thing),
Ayda
Ayda Niknami (she/they) is a Qashqai-Irani queer femme currently residing on the unceded, stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples (so-called “Vancouver”). She is the poetry editor for PRISM International, was a finalist for The Bridge Prize (2024), shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Poetry Award (2025), and has been published in an anthology by Guernica Editions (Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution). Her work explores Iranian diasporic subjectivity, love, and relational autonomy. She is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC, and also holds an MA in Philosophy from UC San Diego.