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Welcome to Week One. All October long, we’ll be exploring the terrifying, the uncanny, and the strange. Each Friday, you’ll receive a new installment featuring:
- A Text Autopsy: a close reading of a short, chilling work
- Generative Prompts: exercises to spark new writing in any genre
- Suggested Readings & Watchings: eerie texts and media
We invite you to write alongside us all week. Use the prompts to spark new work or revisit old drafts, then look out for next Friday’s installment when we’ll sink our teeth into another text.
Your guide for this haunted journey is Jessica Lohafer, one-third of Lemon Grove Writers, a poet and editor living in Washington. Her work has appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Sweet Tree Review, Drunk in the Midnight Choir, Nailed Magazine, and Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. Her poetry collection What’s Left to Be Done was published by Radical Lunchbox Press in 2009, and in 2020 she released the edited anthology Allow the Light: The Lost Poems of Jack McCarthy. She has served as Program Director for Poetry in Public Education, bringing writing workshops to schools throughout the Pacific Northwest, and previously hosted the Write Riot Poetry Slam. She received her MFA in poetry from Western Washington University in 2014.
This week, Jessica begins our series with a dive into Stephen King’s “The Jaunt”. Read it in full (a free PDF is linked here), try the prompts, and let the terror fuel your writing until next Friday.
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"The Jaunt" by Stephen King.
I want you to read this whole story.
No, really. I want you to stop what you’re doing, this instant. I want you to turn away from your work, from your screen of choice, from your lover, your partner, your husband, your friend. I want you to pause every possible scenario in your everyday life so you can run to this story—“The Jaunt,” by Stephen King, to be clear—and I want you to read the whole entire thing so that you too can experience the existential crisis it has given me not once, but twice. The second crisis truly had no business making me this anxious since I knew what was going to happen, but here we are. I cannot experience the psychic shock all by myself; it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, a good host is generous, and what am I, if not your host on a tour of writerly terrors for the next four weeks? And the terror of “The Jaunt?” Oh, Constant Reader, it’s meant to be shared.
Our story opens with an announcement: “This is the last call for Jaunt-701, the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York’s Port Authority Terminal.” Immediately, King has placed us in his plot; while we haven’t heard of a jaunt before, the familiar airport terminal language puts us at ease. We don’t know what’s happening, but we think we know where we are. We quickly become acquainted with our main characters, the Oates family: Mark Oates, his wife Marilys, their older son Ricky and their youngest, Patricia. The children are eager to hear the story of the Jaunt, a teleportation system that’s been up and running long enough to be commonplace at this point in their short lives. Their father finally relents, hoping that he’ll be able to distract them from the ever-encroaching Jaunt attendants who are pushing a cart with equipment to gas passengers in preparation for their trip. What follows is a fascinating tug of war between two narratives: the history of the Jaunt’s creator Victor Carune and the real time experience of Mark telling Ricky and Patricia a sanitized version of the inventor and his wicked invention.
All the while, the Jaunt attendants move closer.
If you’ve finished reading this story, I’m sure its ending has haunted you ever since. And if you haven’t, I sure as hell am not going to be the one to spoil it for you. Because of all the Stephen King stories I’ve read, this is the one that rattles me the most. Maybe it’s because the thought of eternity used to keep me up at night, my child eyes watching as the headlights from passing cars cast their glow across my bedroom walls, shadows standing in for every fearful creature I feared was waiting for me just on the other side of the veil. How long could forever really last?
Longer than you think. Longer than you think.
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Writing Prompts inspired by The Jaunt
- Consider one of your own minor characters. Rather than rushing by them, revise their original role by imagining their personal history. What rumors still swirl about them back home? Are they the focal point of any legendary tall tales?
- Take the line “Considering the alternative.” from The Jaunt and use it as the first line of a poem or story.
- At the beginning of "The Jaunt," Stephen King shows Mark marveling at how much time will pass while his family is living on Mars, writing, "he told himself again that Ricky would be deep in the swamp of puberty and his daughter would likely be developing breasts by the time they got back to earth, and again found it difficult to believe." By the end of the story, this ordinary parental concern takes on a nasty new meaning. Write a scene where you use an ordinary, relatable worry to foreshadow something that will become devastating by your story’s end, like a parent worrying over their child growing up too fast.
- Use the words "Eternity", "Awake", and "Portal" from The Jaunt in a poem or a scene.
- In the world of horror, it's often said that it's better to wait as long as possible to show your monster, because what your reader imagines will always be worse that anything you could dream up. The scariest moment in King's story isn't what we see, it's the 0.000000000067 seconds of eternity that we can only imagine. Write a monologue alluding to a sinister secret without ever quite saying what it is.
- There is a line in this story that always makes me shudder, "it's eternity in there." Write what you think it would be like to make the Jaunt awake, sparing no sensory detail.
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Additional Works We Recommend...
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That’s it for this week’s installment. Stay tuned for next Friday’s dive into another unsettling text. In the meantime, mark your calendar for Saturday, October 18th, when we’ll gather on Zoom for a live writing sprint followed by an open mic. Bring something spooky (or not) to share, or just come listen.
Sign up to read at the Open Mic here! |
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Tag us on Instagram or email us anytime. We'd love to hear how the writing is going!
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