Weekly Newsletter Creative Prompt
Echoes Beneath the Nursery Rhyme
Sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all, nursery rhymes still crawl into your adult brain and linger. What seems innocent enough in youth can take a turn when you realize the undercurrents may not be as innocent as you thought.
Mary Had a Little Lamb. Ring‑around‑the‑Rosie. London Bridge. We grow up singing these without thinking much about them—simple melodies, easy to memorize, handed to us before we even remember learning them.
But many nursery rhymes carry shadows: plague histories, ruined cities, forgotten tragedies. Others simply feel eerie, even without a confirmed backstory, as though something older and heavier is woven into the tune.
This week, choose a children’s song or rhyme—whether it’s one whose proposed dark origins you know, or one you’ve never questioned—and create from the feeling it stirs in you now.
What lives under the melody? What memory, fear, tenderness, or myth does it unlock when you listen as an adult rather than as a child?
This Week’s Challenge
Let the rhyme be a doorway, not a subject.
Write, draw, collage, compose, choreograph, design, or otherwise craft a piece that responds to the emotional undercurrent of a nursery rhyme. Don’t retell the rhyme itself—follow the atmosphere it conjures. The sweetness, the dread, the nostalgia, the uncanny, the grief, the comfort.
A Way In
Not sure where to start?
Close your eyes and hum a nursery rhyme you knew as a child—one that surfaced without effort. Don’t choose; just notice which one appeared. Then sit with it for a moment before you look anything up. What does it feel like in your body? What image comes? What age do you become? That instinctive, pre-analytical response is your material. Start there.
Craft Lessons
The best use of the prompt is to not overexplain the perceived meaning behind the nursery rhymes, but to open up their hoods and see what you can find underneath.
Atmosphere is an Argument
The best responses to this prompt won’t explain what the rhyme “means”—they’ll make the reader feel something the rhyme already knows. Think of atmosphere not as decoration but as structure. Every sensory detail, every choice of pacing, is doing persuasive work. Ask yourself: what is the emotional claim I’m making, and is every line earning it?
The Familiar Made Strange (defamiliarization)
Nursery rhymes work because they’re already defamiliarized—adult experience compressed into child-sized language. Your job is a second defamiliarization: take the thing you know by heart and make it strange again. Try shifting scale (enormous, microscopic), time period, point of view, or medium. Strangeness creates attention, and attention creates meaning.
Restraint as Resonance
Resist the urge to explain the darkness. The most haunting pieces in this tradition—Into the Woods, Grimm originals, Angela Carter’s retellings—earn their power through what they withhold. Name the feeling; don’t narrate it. Trust the reader to feel what you felt. One unexplained detail, held with confidence, will do more than a paragraph of analysis.
Helpful Tip
On research and instinct: The proposed “dark origins” of many nursery rhymes—plague, beheadings, political satire—are often folklore themselves, not verified history. That’s not a problem; it’s a gift. You don’t need the backstory to be true for it to be emotionally true. If you want to research, go ahead—but don’t let the research become a substitute for your own felt response. The most powerful work here will come from what the rhyme does to you, not from what historians say it meant.
Try This:
Before you write, draw a line down a page. On the left, list everything you know about the rhyme—words, characters, any backstory. On the right, list everything you feel—images, body sensations, memories, associations. Then write from the right column only.
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