INTERSECTIONALITY | WRITING PROMPT

Bending In Real Time

Intersectionality writing prompt for April 2026

Photo by carmen dominguez on Unsplash

I was supposed to spend the summer in Cairo.

It was the first week of summer in the middle of my college years. I was elbow-deep in a language that only truly existed for me on the page, and was looking forward to immersing myself in the tangible expression of the accompanying culture: the food, the music, perhaps even the women.

But civil unrest and messy politics were too much for my conservative Cuban parents to bear, and they pulled the plug on the trip I’d planned.

“Find something else to do, but not that.”

Two weeks later, I stepped off a plane in the Czech Republic.

To say I was unprepared for the experience would be generous. I knew exactly ten words in Czech — all of which I’d learned from a travel guide on the 10-hour plane ride over the Atlantic.

I hadn’t thought to write down the address of the office for the TEFL program I’d enrolled myself in, but I was armed with the bull-headed stubbornness only a nineteen-year-old can wield, and a phone number jotted down on a post-it note.

“I’ll just call the office when I land,” I thought to myself. “How hard could it be?”

Very, it turns out. This was before the time of cell phones that worked across borders, or digital translation saviors that waited patiently in the wings to translate your fingertips’ desperate pleas.

Still, I’ve never been one to back down from a linguistic challenge.

My first call was answered promptly by a harried-sounding woman who may as well have been speaking in tongues. After what felt like an hour but was more likely only 30 seconds, she hung up on me with a huff.

I called back — twice! — but she hung up as soon as she heard my voice on the line.

I had no backup plan, so I did what any self-respecting college student does in times of stress and ducked into a pub across the street from the payphone I’d been using like a lifeline to have a think.

Three beers and one Czech rendition of “These Boots Are Made For Walking” later, I’d befriended an elderly man who’d spent enough of his youth in the UK to understand me, and thrust the wrinkled Post-it with the phone number into his hands.

“You can call for me, yes? Need address!”

“No, no… of course!”

In the end, with Pavel’s assistance, I did find my way to the office, and, eventually, to a teaching career I would enjoy for the next twenty years.

Would it have been easier if I had planned better? Certainly.

But I wouldn’t have met Pavel, or learned a lesson that has been far more consequential in my life than the concept of writing down important information: I learned to trust my own flexibility.

To trust that I would figure it out, even if it didn’t feel easy from the middle of the process, and that I don’t need to know each step of the process to know that I’ll reach my goal, in the end.

That lesson has been indispensable.

This month’s writing prompt is: FLEXIBILITY

• Describe a time when your carefully laid plans collapsed, and you had to act. What does that reveal about who you are today?
• Write about a time when flexibility wasn’t optional, and what that cost you.
• Write about something you held firm on when everyone around you was asking you to bend.
• Have you ever had to live in an unfamiliar place? Describe the experience of learning to exist in a different world from scratch.
• Where is the line between being adaptable and losing yourself? Write about a moment when you weren’t sure which side of that line you were on.

The Details

As always, previous prompts remain active! Feel free to submit stories for any of the monthly prompts, or anything else that’s on your mind related to the in-between areas of your life.

Unpublished drafts only, please.

Please note: our submission process has changed. You do not need to be added as a writer for the pub to submit a story to Intersectionality. You will be added to the pub as a writer if your first draft submission is accepted for publication.

For more information, please refer to the Submission Guidelines:

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