NWW Photo Prompt ~ Alien Places |

Welcome to the September 15th, 2015 edition of the NWW Photo Prompt!

The New West Writers Photo Prompt is a twice-monthly challenge for writers of all genres. It’s easy to participate — and we encourage everyone to do so. Just spend a moment with the image above and write whatever comes to mind. A couple of lines, or a couple thousand words. Prose, non-fiction, poetry, even a six word story, if you like.

There are no winners (we’re all writers sharing our words) and no rules. Well, one — be respectful with your words.

You can announce your post with a link in a comment below, or if you link to this page from your post, we’ll publish the trackback link in the comment section of this page. Add an “nww photo prompt” tag to your post and we’ll also provide a link to your response in the next challenge. This post outlines these few simple steps.

To get you going, one of our writing group’s members will have the first go at the prompt. Base your post on theirs or go a completely different way.

Alien Places
by Patrick Jennings

In the beginning
I traveled to alien places
Where I learned a lot
About the world

Until I realized
I was the alien
And then I began to learn
What’s important

What’s me
What’s not me

Happy writing!

About the photograph:

In 1998 I bicycled 6,000 kilometers across China. In many ways, China is arguably the most alien place I’ve travelled to.

At least, that’s what I thought, until I reached Xinjiang province, AKA, The Uyghur Autonomous Region.

You probably didn’t realize that the country’s population isn’t entirely Chinese. A sizeable proportion consists of what the Chinese government politely refers to as “minority nationalities”.

Xinjiang is, by far, the country’s largest province. And though it is, especially by Chinese standards, very sparsely populated, the majority population is Muslim, predominantly the Uyghur people.

This photograph was taken along a market street in Kashgar, far-western Xinjiang, just a hop-skip-and-a-steep-climb up to Pakistan over the Karakorum Highway. There’s a butcher on the right, a vegetable stand next to it, and a street food vendor standing at his smokey barbecue, likely serving lamb kebabs.