June Prompts: How To Find Creative Prompts To Inspire

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There is a particular kind of evening that belongs entirely to June. It’s nine o’clock, and the sky is still pale blue. The air is warm and smells of cut grass and something floral you can’t quite identify. The birds are finally quietening down after a long day. Everything feels suspended, as if the year has reached a peak and is holding its breath before tipping over into the other side.

That evening happens in June. Specifically around the summer solstice, which falls on or around the 21st. The longest day of the year. After that, almost imperceptibly, the days begin to shorten again. Summer has officially arrived and is already, technically, beginning to leave.

I find this a strange and beautiful thing to sit with. June is simultaneously the height of summer and the beginning of its decline. Both things are true at the same time.

This is the sixth post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We’ve moved from January’s bare stillness all the way through to this. The full warmth of summer. The longest evenings of the year. The world is at its most open and generous.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

The summer solstice on or around the 21st of June is the astronomical peak of summer in the northern hemisphere. The sun is at its highest point in the sky. Daylight is at its maximum. In northern Scotland and Scandinavia, the sun barely sets at all. In the southern parts of the US and Europe, the days are long, hot and very bright.

After the solstice, the change is initially almost undetectable. You lose a minute or two of daylight each day at first. By late June, you might notice the evenings drawing in very slightly. But mid-June still feels expansive and generous with light.

In the natural world, June is the peak of the breeding season for many species. Baby birds are everywhere, many of them freshly fledged and looking uncertain about the whole thing. Hedgehog hoglets are out at night. Fox cubs are increasingly visible. In the US, fireflies begin appearing in the evenings in the eastern states from June onwards. This is one of those genuinely magical natural phenomena worth going out specifically to see. The Firefly Atlas, run by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, is a citizen science project that tracks firefly populations across North America.

Meadow flowers are at their peak. Ox-eye daisies, field scabious, knapweed, and red clover fill verges and unimproved grassland with colour. In the US, prairie wildflowers are beginning to bloom across the Midwest. Grasses are flowering too, though less showy, but worth noticing. Grass flowers are actually very beautiful if you look at them closely.

The elder is finishing its flowering and starting to form the tiny green berries that will become elderberries in autumn. Roses are at their peak. The air on a warm June evening in a garden with roses is one of those experiences that is hard to describe adequately.

Nature Journalling: The Solstice Watch

The summer solstice is one of the great moments of the natural calendar. People have been marking it for thousands of years, from Stonehenge to Newgrange to solstice celebrations across almost every culture. It’s worth marking in your own small way.

One of the simplest and most satisfying things to do around the solstice is to note the exact times of sunrise and sunset in your location and then actually be awake for one or both of them. Watching the sun rise on the longest day, or staying out until the sky finally goes dark on the longest evening, is a kind of quiet ceremony that connects you to something very old.

Prompt: On or around the summer solstice, go outside at either sunrise or sunset. Sit in one place for the whole event. Write down what you notice in real time as the light changes. What colours appear in the sky and in what order? How do sounds change as the light does? What does the air feel like at the exact moment of sunrise or the exact moment of dusk? Don’t try to write beautifully. Just write what is actually there.

For solstice times specific to your location anywhere in the world, Time and Date is accurate and easy to use. For the history and folklore of midsummer celebrations across different cultures, The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall has fascinating resources, and for a broader cultural overview, the Folklore Society again is excellent.

Poetry: Midsummer and the Long Light

Midsummer has generated some of the most enduring literature in the English language. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the obvious example. But the midsummer setting is not arbitrary. It matters that the play happens at midsummer, when boundaries between worlds are thin, when the normal order is temporarily suspended, when magic is more possible.

John Keats wrote some of his most sensory, rich, and almost overwhelming poetry in response to summer. To Autumn is his most famous seasonal poem but his June and July writing is worth seeking out too. Everything in Keats is very physical, full of texture, scent, and warmth.

In the American tradition, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself has a particular midsummer quality. It’s expansive and generous and slightly excessive in the way that June itself is.

There is also a long tradition of night poetry in June, particularly around the solstice. The short night, the almost-perpetual dusk, the strange quality of midsummer darkness.

Prompt: Write a poem about the long evening light of June. Try to write about the specific quality of the light at a specific time, maybe eight o’clock, maybe nine. What colour is the sky exactly, and what does it do to the things it falls on? What does it feel like to be inside that light? Try to make the reader feel the temperature.

For reading around midsummer poetry, the Poetry Foundation’s archive has a good collection of summer poems to browse. The Welsh poet RS Thomas also wrote about the long light of northern summers with extraordinary intensity.

Photography: Golden Hour Gets Late

By June, golden hour has shifted to a genuinely civilised time of evening. In much of northern Europe and the northern US, the best light is arriving around eight or nine in the evening. This means you can eat dinner, take your time, and still get out for the golden hour without any particular effort.

The quality of June’s evening light is different from spring light. It’s warmer and more golden. Shadows are long. Colours are saturated. A meadow in June at golden hour, with ox-eye daisies and grasses catching the horizontal light, is one of those photographs that almost takes itself.

Morning light in June is also extraordinary. Sunrise is very early. Around four or four-thirty in the UK and northern states. That means early June mornings have an almost unreal beauty that most people sleep through. Mist over fields. Low light through hedgerow gaps. Dew on spider webs in the grass.

Prompt: Go out in the last hour of light on a June evening. Find a meadow, a verge, a garden, anywhere with grass and flowers at about waist height. Get down low, close to the ground, and photograph the flowers from below against the sky. The low angle with low light completely transforms ordinary things. A buttercup becomes a tiny sun. A grass head becomes a silhouette with a halo. Try to find a composition where the foreground is sharp and the background is a blur of warm light.

For inspiration, the nature photographer Joe Cornish works extensively with northern English and Scottish landscapes and understands June evening light particularly well. His approach to finding the extraordinary in familiar landscapes is worth studying.

Short Story: The Short Night

June nights are brief and strange. In the very north, they barely happen at all. Even in the middle of England or the northern US, the window of real darkness is short. There is a quality to midsummer nights that is quite unlike the long winter nights we spent back in January.

The folklore of midsummer night is rich. Across European traditions, midsummer was a time when the natural order was disrupted. When plants gathered at midnight had magical properties. When the boundaries between the human and the fairy worlds dissolved. You don’t have to believe any of this to find it interesting material for fiction.

There is also something worth exploring in the idea of insomnia in June. The light coming in too early. The short night that isn’t quite dark enough for proper sleep. The particular quality of lying awake at three in the morning when the sky outside is already turning pale again.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 800 words set during a single midsummer night. Your character is awake when they shouldn’t be. Something is keeping them up, or something wakes them in the brief hours of real darkness. What do they see or hear or think about in the strange short night of midsummer? Let the unusual light be part of the story rather than just background.

For beautifully written fiction that engages with midsummer and the supernatural edge of the natural world, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service is set in a Welsh summer and brilliantly handles the weight of myth in landscape. Tove Jansson’s writing often captures the specific quality of Nordic midsummer light with great tenderness.

Drawing: Grasses and Meadow Flowers

June is the best month of the year to draw grasses, and I want to make the case for grasses as drawing subjects because they tend to get overlooked in favour of more obviously showy flowers.

Grasses in flower are genuinely beautiful. The flower heads vary enormously from species to species. Timothy grass has a dense cylindrical head. Yorkshire fog is soft and feathery and purplish. Sweet vernal grass has a delicate, open structure. Drawing grasses teaches you about line, rhythm, and repetition in a way that drawing flowers doesn’t quite do.

Meadow flowers are also at their peak this month. Ox-eye daisies are relatively straightforward to draw but endlessly satisfying. Clover is complex and interesting. Field scabious has a delicate, complicated flower head that rewards close attention.

Prompt: Go to a verge or meadow and sit down in the grass. From your sitting position, draw exactly what you can see from ground level. You’re not looking down at the plants. You’re looking across at them, the way an insect would. Notice how the layers of grasses and flowers create depth and pattern. Draw for at least twenty minutes without standing up.

For guidance on drawing grasses and meadow plants specifically, the illustrator and naturalist John Muir Laws has extensive free tutorials on his website covering all aspects of nature journaling and botanical illustration. His approach is warm, practical, and genuinely useful for all levels.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Strawberries, Elderflower Still, and the First Salads

June is the beginning of real summer eating. The strawberry season is properly underway, and if you can find locally grown strawberries rather than imported ones, the difference in flavour is remarkable. A warm strawberry eaten in a field in June, still slightly warm from the sun, is one of the best things you can eat anywhere.

Elderflower cordial made in May should be in your fridge by now and is worth drinking throughout June. Elderflower goes beautifully with gooseberries, which are also starting to appear and are criminally underused as a fruit. A gooseberry and elderflower fool, which is just a mixture of cooked gooseberries and whipped cream, is one of the easiest and best desserts of the entire summer.

Salad leaves and herbs are abundant. Courgettes are just beginning in warmer areas. New potatoes are arriving. In the US, depending on your region, early summer produce is either well underway or just beginning, so check the Seasonal Food Guide for your area.

The summer solstice is worth marking with food as well as observation. Many cultures have traditional midsummer foods, often involving dairy, fresh bread, and whatever is most abundant locally.

Recipe prompt: Make a strawberry and elderflower dessert of some kind. The simplest option is sliced strawberries macerated in elderflower cordial for an hour, served with clotted cream or thick yoghurt. Alternatively, try a gooseberry and elderflower fool if you can find gooseberries. The aim is to combine two things that are only both available at the same time for a brief few weeks. That overlap, and using it, is what seasonal cooking is really about.

For summer recipes built around British seasonal produce, Nigel Slater’s writing in the Guardian is consistently excellent. For US seasonal summer cooking, Smitten Kitchen handles the early summer harvest beautifully.

One Last Thing

After the solstice, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not immediately. But there is a turn. The year begins its slow arc back towards winter. The days start to shorten again, just by seconds at first, then by minutes.

I don’t find this melancholy, exactly. I find it interesting. The solstice is the high-water mark. The point of maximum light and warmth. Knowing it’s there, and then knowing it has just passed, makes you pay attention differently.

The Japanese have a useful concept here, too. Wabi-sabi is the appreciation of things that are imperfect and impermanent. June, at its most beautiful, is worth appreciating precisely because it is temporary. The long light will shorten. The roses will drop their petals. The strawberries will finish.

Be in it while it’s here.

I’ll be back in July, when summer settles into its deeper, heavier self and the year begins its slow turn.

Previously: May. Next month: July and the deep heart of summer.