OxLit: Get your creative writing in the Pin Oak!

Each month, we’ll feature a new prompt to get your creative juices flowing.

Send your completed pieces to the Editor before October 24, 2026.

Prompt: Write a short story (400-500 words) based on a song of your choice. Incorporate lines or motifs from the song, and make the song title the title of your story. 

Featured work: Sonoma Raceway

Round and round and round,
A multicoloured haze.
Round and round and round,
Arranged like dominoes.

Round and round and round,
Eye-catching spectacle,
Round and round and round,
One great cacophony.

Until      –      one domino 
Turns on the rest           –          out 
Of sync           – 
Screeches

Off the track    –
The well-oiled mechanism
No longer
In control                                – 

The crowd crescendos, 
As the dominoes fall. 
But the rest go on,
In circles and circles.

Round and round and round,
Burnt rubber in the air,
Round and round and round,
‘Til one wins, fair and square. 

Justification

My poem, ‘Sonoma Raceway,’ explores how circumstances can quickly go out of control, yet life continues even in the face of disaster. To demonstrate this, I wrote about my personal experience of seeing a car go off the track at the Sonoma Raceway in California. Through the experimentation with conventional and unconventional rhythm and structure, as well as figurative language, I represented the patterns and disruptions that can occur in the place of a racetrack.

 I employed both structured and unstructured verse to reflect the predictable, repetitive and unpredictable, chaotic nature of a car race. Stanzas one, two, four and five are all structured as quatrains, each alternating between pentasyllabic and hexasyllabic lines, to mirror the circular movement of the cars around the track: “Round and round and round / One great cacophony.” Whereas I made my form look chaotic in the stanza three, using em-dashes and fragmentation to disrupt this rhythm, describing how one car goes “out / Of sync – Screeches / Off the track.” By making my own rhythm go out of sync, I imitate the way a car that goes off track alters the synchronised rhythm of a race. Therefore, I mirrored the duality of my chosen place through my form.

Furthermore, I developed the simile and metaphor of dominoes to create a clear visual image of the orderly performance of the cars being in sync. In my first stanza, I used a simile to describe how the cars were “Arranged like dominoes,” which reflects the meticulous, careful arrangement of the cars. This early simile evolves into a metaphor, as I describe how “one domino / Turns on / The rest,” which demonstrates how the race morphs into a chaotic mess. This was influenced by Mackellar’s figurative language, as she uses personification and metaphors to present Australia as a “sunburnt” and “opal-hearted country.” Hence, through my figurative language, I was further able to juxtapose the calm and chaotic atmosphere of racetracks.

Thus, my poem, ‘Sonoma Raceway’, uses its structure and its figurative devices to show how raceways – just like life itself – can rapidly change in the blink of an eye, shifting between stability and instability.

Amber M, Year 7