#AliceIsLove Writing Prompts
The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. If we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. —Alice Wong (1974–2025)
These prompts were created by Jane Shi, a friend of Alice's who has known her for four years. Online friendships throughout the ongoing pandemic have been one of Alice's many gifts to the world—a web of connective tissue of care, love, and memories. Both hers and the online friendships Jane has cultivated with writer friends have kept her practice going and informed how she writes and what she writes about.
Alice supported Jane in writing about her and her communities' experiences of racism, ableism, isolation, community organizing, and disabled QTIBIPOC friendship across the ongoing pandemic. She worked with her and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on Crips for eSims for Gaza for nearly two years, before joining the ancestors on November 14th, 2025. Together, they translated articles into many languages, and interviewed Moaz of Gaza Online, another Gaza eSIM distribution org that offers internet access to thousands of besieged Palestinians in Gaza when the IOF destroyed cell towers, electricity, and fibre cables. Access is love and love is a free Palestine.
Big appreciation to all the authors who contributed to the wildly successful Authors for eSims auction last summer organized by Thea Lim and Jody Chan (with the help of T. Liem). Contact us at [email protected] if you want to scheme about another one in the future. :)
Donate
Today, this project is still going, into a third year of an Israeli genocide and imperialist aggression that has expanded into other regions in West Asia with direct U.S. (and Canadian…) involvement. If Alice were here today, she would be furious and sharing fundraisers and posts in solidarity with all those bombed and displaced; uplifting disabled writers from impacted countries on their peoples' experiences; and using her platform to call out both the U.S. government and mainstream disabled organizations on their silence and complicity.
Alice was an incredible advocate with a penchant for humour and gathering people together. As poet Travis Chi Wing Lau shared in a recent interview, Alice's legacy is also one of disabled pleasure—the right for all bodyminds to experience pleasure, decadence, and sex in their own disabled ways. When Alice's friend Stacey Park Milbern passed away, she was quick to correct mainstream media's misconceptions about her. Alice loved her friends and families fiercely. She loved animals, including her beloved cats Bert and Ernie. One of the last things she texted Jane and others in a group chat was about meeting a koala named Stacey.
Alice cultivated space for Disabled Rage just as she spread Disabled Joy. Alice was also a Disabled Oracle, knowing our experiences as disabled people help us become seers for the horrors to come. Against a griefphobic and deathphobic society (shoutout to queercrip poet and death doula Q Lawrence for teaching Jane these concepts), Alice wrote about death as her “constant shadow partner.” She understood that "good shit takes time." She was a Trekkie, foodie, and brilliant satirist. These prompts, pulled from some of these threads, reflect a small sliver of Alice's incomparable legacy. Thank you so much for participating and witnessing. Alice looks forward to reading what you write from the stars.
Prompt #1: The Oracle
What does your bodymind, or what do your experiences, tell you about the future of our world? If you followed the logical conclusions of your aches, pains, bodily sensations, neurodivergences, and madnesses to their end point, what kind of society would that be?
Pick one aspect of your bodymind—a quirk unique to you, an experience, a feature (never a bug)—and turn it into a machine, creature, or spaceship. What would be on the spaceship? What would the creature smell like? What would this machine offer the world that we so desperately need in this moment? What would its technologies help with that does not yet exist? What new problems would it accidentally introduce? Ask your machine, creature, or spaceship what they know about the future. What item would you take from that future to bring back to help the present? What happens when it breaks?
Prompt #2: The Recipe
What would be the opposite of a recipe for disaster but pleasure, joy, comfort, serendipity, and wonder?
Write a list poem of what would be in the ingredients for a recipe in your life if you had all your heart desired, if your curiosity stretched back into time and into the future, and as if you were passing this recipe down to the next generation with slight water damage or digital corruption. What are the steps that the next generation would take to remake these pleasures and joys anew? How would they fill in the blanks? What would be that mysterious handful of unmeasured spice that calls for their own spin and intuition?
Prompt #3: The Cyborg
Invent a new poetic or prose form inspired by your bodymind, culture, language(s) or ancestors. Some ideas: If the iambic pentameter is based on the human heartbeat, what would your metre be instead? Which animal's heartbeat would be most like this form? If the villanelle is a pastoral ballad inspired by peasant oral songs, how many lines or tercets would yours have, living under this stage of capitalism in our times? What would a pastoral be like in our climate catastrophic present and future? What is the structure of a T4T sonnet?
Write an "abecedarian" but based on systems in your language (Jane's example: the bopomoforian)—see also Winston Lê's hybrid poetics rooted in heritage Vietnamese, Fred Wah’s biotext, Sonnet L'Abbé's Sonnet's Shakespeare, or Marwa Helal's The Arabic in Winter Tangerine:
"The Arabic is a form that includes an Arabic letter with an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left as the Arabic language is, and vehemently rejects you if you try to read it left to right. To vehemently reject, in this case, means to transfer the feeling of every time the poet has heard an English as Only Language speaker patronizingly utter in some variation the following phrase: "Oh, [so-and-so] is English as a Second Language..." As if it was a kind of weakness, nah."
Prompt #4: The Residency
This is Jane's cheeky contribution of bridging Alice's advocacy work and sense of humour with the popular genre of autofiction. (Not that Jane has been able to write any fiction in the past few years that isn't secretly autobiogr—I mean, uh, autofictional...)
Write a satirical short story about a writing residency or MFA program featuring alien and/or cyborg writers. You are one of the only human writers. What shenanigans would you get up to? How would they enter the building or classroom? (Can they even enter the classroom?) Are some of the aliens made of light? How did they all learn English and what would they write about their challenges learning it? Would the robot writer be asked to not use their, erm, “AI” capabilities? What constitutes alien discrimination? What conflicting access needs would create drama between the students? What cliques would form? Would you develop a crush on one of the cyborg writers? What happens when they reject you or you break up (would you still attend their book launch? They yours?)? Would you join the aliens in a letter-writing campaign to the dean when funding is cut? What controversies or scandals would erupt at the end of the residency or term? Be as silly or scathing as possible.
Prompt #5: The Interview
Alice Wong was a podcast host of the Disability Visibility podcast where she produced 100 episodes, some of them reprinted in her memoir Year of the Tiger. She was wonderful at uplifting her guests’ stories, learning from them, while also challenging our thinking on disability and access. These prompts are based on writing dialogues and interviews in several genres.
With love,
Jane Shi
These prompts were created by Jane Shi, a friend of Alice's who has known her for four years. Online friendships throughout the ongoing pandemic have been one of Alice's many gifts to the world—a web of connective tissue of care, love, and memories. Both hers and the online friendships Jane has cultivated with writer friends have kept her practice going and informed how she writes and what she writes about.
Alice supported Jane in writing about her and her communities' experiences of racism, ableism, isolation, community organizing, and disabled QTIBIPOC friendship across the ongoing pandemic. She worked with her and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on Crips for eSims for Gaza for nearly two years, before joining the ancestors on November 14th, 2025. Together, they translated articles into many languages, and interviewed Moaz of Gaza Online, another Gaza eSIM distribution org that offers internet access to thousands of besieged Palestinians in Gaza when the IOF destroyed cell towers, electricity, and fibre cables. Access is love and love is a free Palestine.
Big appreciation to all the authors who contributed to the wildly successful Authors for eSims auction last summer organized by Thea Lim and Jody Chan (with the help of T. Liem). Contact us at [email protected] if you want to scheme about another one in the future. :)
Donate
Today, this project is still going, into a third year of an Israeli genocide and imperialist aggression that has expanded into other regions in West Asia with direct U.S. (and Canadian…) involvement. If Alice were here today, she would be furious and sharing fundraisers and posts in solidarity with all those bombed and displaced; uplifting disabled writers from impacted countries on their peoples' experiences; and using her platform to call out both the U.S. government and mainstream disabled organizations on their silence and complicity.
Alice was an incredible advocate with a penchant for humour and gathering people together. As poet Travis Chi Wing Lau shared in a recent interview, Alice's legacy is also one of disabled pleasure—the right for all bodyminds to experience pleasure, decadence, and sex in their own disabled ways. When Alice's friend Stacey Park Milbern passed away, she was quick to correct mainstream media's misconceptions about her. Alice loved her friends and families fiercely. She loved animals, including her beloved cats Bert and Ernie. One of the last things she texted Jane and others in a group chat was about meeting a koala named Stacey.
Alice cultivated space for Disabled Rage just as she spread Disabled Joy. Alice was also a Disabled Oracle, knowing our experiences as disabled people help us become seers for the horrors to come. Against a griefphobic and deathphobic society (shoutout to queercrip poet and death doula Q Lawrence for teaching Jane these concepts), Alice wrote about death as her “constant shadow partner.” She understood that "good shit takes time." She was a Trekkie, foodie, and brilliant satirist. These prompts, pulled from some of these threads, reflect a small sliver of Alice's incomparable legacy. Thank you so much for participating and witnessing. Alice looks forward to reading what you write from the stars.
Prompt #1: The Oracle
What does your bodymind, or what do your experiences, tell you about the future of our world? If you followed the logical conclusions of your aches, pains, bodily sensations, neurodivergences, and madnesses to their end point, what kind of society would that be?
Pick one aspect of your bodymind—a quirk unique to you, an experience, a feature (never a bug)—and turn it into a machine, creature, or spaceship. What would be on the spaceship? What would the creature smell like? What would this machine offer the world that we so desperately need in this moment? What would its technologies help with that does not yet exist? What new problems would it accidentally introduce? Ask your machine, creature, or spaceship what they know about the future. What item would you take from that future to bring back to help the present? What happens when it breaks?
Prompt #2: The Recipe
What would be the opposite of a recipe for disaster but pleasure, joy, comfort, serendipity, and wonder?
Write a list poem of what would be in the ingredients for a recipe in your life if you had all your heart desired, if your curiosity stretched back into time and into the future, and as if you were passing this recipe down to the next generation with slight water damage or digital corruption. What are the steps that the next generation would take to remake these pleasures and joys anew? How would they fill in the blanks? What would be that mysterious handful of unmeasured spice that calls for their own spin and intuition?
Prompt #3: The Cyborg
Invent a new poetic or prose form inspired by your bodymind, culture, language(s) or ancestors. Some ideas: If the iambic pentameter is based on the human heartbeat, what would your metre be instead? Which animal's heartbeat would be most like this form? If the villanelle is a pastoral ballad inspired by peasant oral songs, how many lines or tercets would yours have, living under this stage of capitalism in our times? What would a pastoral be like in our climate catastrophic present and future? What is the structure of a T4T sonnet?
Write an "abecedarian" but based on systems in your language (Jane's example: the bopomoforian)—see also Winston Lê's hybrid poetics rooted in heritage Vietnamese, Fred Wah’s biotext, Sonnet L'Abbé's Sonnet's Shakespeare, or Marwa Helal's The Arabic in Winter Tangerine:
"The Arabic is a form that includes an Arabic letter with an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left as the Arabic language is, and vehemently rejects you if you try to read it left to right. To vehemently reject, in this case, means to transfer the feeling of every time the poet has heard an English as Only Language speaker patronizingly utter in some variation the following phrase: "Oh, [so-and-so] is English as a Second Language..." As if it was a kind of weakness, nah."
Prompt #4: The Residency
This is Jane's cheeky contribution of bridging Alice's advocacy work and sense of humour with the popular genre of autofiction. (Not that Jane has been able to write any fiction in the past few years that isn't secretly autobiogr—I mean, uh, autofictional...)
Write a satirical short story about a writing residency or MFA program featuring alien and/or cyborg writers. You are one of the only human writers. What shenanigans would you get up to? How would they enter the building or classroom? (Can they even enter the classroom?) Are some of the aliens made of light? How did they all learn English and what would they write about their challenges learning it? Would the robot writer be asked to not use their, erm, “AI” capabilities? What constitutes alien discrimination? What conflicting access needs would create drama between the students? What cliques would form? Would you develop a crush on one of the cyborg writers? What happens when they reject you or you break up (would you still attend their book launch? They yours?)? Would you join the aliens in a letter-writing campaign to the dean when funding is cut? What controversies or scandals would erupt at the end of the residency or term? Be as silly or scathing as possible.
Prompt #5: The Interview
Alice Wong was a podcast host of the Disability Visibility podcast where she produced 100 episodes, some of them reprinted in her memoir Year of the Tiger. She was wonderful at uplifting her guests’ stories, learning from them, while also challenging our thinking on disability and access. These prompts are based on writing dialogues and interviews in several genres.
- Write a poem in two (or three? more?!) voices interviewing each other about the subject of your book. What kind of interviewer would one voice be? What happens when they switch voices? Would they be antagonistic, interrupt each other, or crack jokes at inappropriate times?
- Write a podcast episode between two characters in your work-in-progress. Pick ones that would be unlikely to meet. Make one the annoying podcast bro. Make them both annoying podcast bros but non-binary. What kind of podcast genre would it be? True crime? Political commentary? Celebrity gossip? Comedy? Sports? Literary like Sanna Wani and Jody Chan’s Poet Talk? Would it be less like a podcast and more like a videogame stream? Would they get into TikTok fights later?! Fight the manosphere??
- For memoir/non-fiction writers: write a set of interview questions for an ancestor or family member or friend and then write the set of interview questions they would send you. Answer both sets of questions. Lie as often as possible. Or: write as truthfully as possible as if neither they nor anyone else would ever read the answers.
With love,
Jane Shi
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