Examining Inktober - Part 1

Inktober is a challenge issued on Instagram every October. As the name implies, the challenge is to create an ink drawing each day of the month. The official website for Inktober and their substack, , give more details on the challenge including prompts.

So, why was I doing Inktober as a poet? My dear friend, Matt Ashbaugh, is a visual artist. Last year, he made a drawing each day of Inktober, and to challenge myself, I wrote a poem about each of those drawings. Ekphrastic poetry, which is poetry about a work of art.

This year, we did things the other way around. He wanted to double up, creating a story visually during Inktober based on the prompts. He also wanted me to create a poem for each prompt, and he would then create a drawing based on my poem. It was fun and freeing in some ways, and I want to share my process and thoughts behind the poems.

Day 1 – Dream

This poem is pure truth. I don’t remember my dreams. I know that I dream, I wake with vivid images, but they flutter away before they commit to memory. It’s fascinating, and I recently saw in my Ancestry app that forgetting dreams might be genetic. I know, strange for a writer to forget his dreams, but it’s my reality.

Matt with a drawing of…me (though not with my current hair). Or him. The hair is closer to his, and I don’t wear flannel. We have similar profiles and I kinda dig that it could be either of us.

Day 2 – Spiders

I guess I was still thinking about dreams after the first poem. More truth here. You ever get those weird tickling sensations like you have bugs on you even though you don’t? Like phantom ick. Then, yeah, whenever I start dreaming about bugs, they tend to multiply, so I wake myself up. I focus on a story problem I’m working on, and let that take me back to sleep. Most of the lines here end with “eight,” and those that don’t rhyme or slant rhyme.

Matt drew a spider, naturally. I’m fascinated by how he wove the words around the spider, like they created his web.

Day 3 – Path

For this third poem, my wife and I were on vacation. We were on a beach at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun. Torturous, right? After a busy year and very busy summer, I needed a do-nothing vacation. Needless to say, I looked around me, pen and notebook in hand, and wrote about what I saw. Also, how I felt. I never noticed before this trip how much I connect to the Earth when I’m in her waters.

What’s cool here is that I didn’t send Matt a photo of my view, so it’s from his head and memories. To me, it looks more like Tybee Island than Cancun, and I think that’s cool. It combines my own memories of two different beaches.

Day 4 – Dodge

After reading Inverse Cowgirl by Alicia Roth Weigel

I’m intersex, and so I was really looking forward to the release of Inverse Cowgirl by Alicia Roth Weigel. It’s a memoir of her life as an intersex woman. I read the entire book in about a day and loved it. Maybe I should write a memoir? I’m still thinking about that. Needless to say, I needed to poetry about it.

I’m still processing why Matt used a hand here. Again, I haven’t asked because I prefer to work through it on my own. But he used the intersex flag and colors, which are fitting. The circle means that we intersex people are whole and complete just as we are.

Day 5 – Map

More beach poetry. This was the first poem of Inktober that made me sit there and really think about how to respond to the prompt. Map? Makes sense for ink drawings, but less so for poetry. Gazing out over the ocean, though, I found it. And wound up writing a love poem for my wife. This vacation was for our 10-year anniversary, after all, so it was fitting. This was also the first poem of the challenge that I think has legs, that I’ll keep working on.

Matt leaned into the marriage aspect of the poem, pulling that image from one of our wedding photos and playing with it. I dig it.

Day 6 – Golden

Almost done with the beach poems, I swear. This was the second of several acrostic poems that I wrote during the month. That is, the first letter of each line spells out a word, the prompt word. The Path poem was the first. This was not a great poem to me, but it fulfilled the challenge for the day.

Sunset over the ocean. Yeah, that’s about right. And again, I didn’t send Matt a photo, so he created this from the poem and his own memories. I love that juxtaposition.

Stay tuned for the next batch of poem in a few days!