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Starting Tomorrow: October Challenges!

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

Bring ’em on—the October challenges, that is! Starting tomorrow, I’ll participate in two writing challenges of different sorts.

 

The Submit-O-Rama is the brainchild of Khara House, poet/blogger extraordinaire at Our Lost Jungle. Khara has offered several levels of commitment so we can submit our work during October at a rate we’re comfortable with. I’m going with the one I think I’m most likely to do–the Submit-O-Rama Choice Challenge–wherein I make my own rules. And my rules will be to submit one story a week over the next month–not the same story each time!

 

 

My parents, before I was born.

 

 

The other challenge I’m subscribing to of my own free will is the October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge hosted by Jane Ann McLachlan at Join the Conversation. You’ll learn more about this one and my motivation for participating when you read the first memory blog post tomorrow: a memory before the age of two! Jane Ann has encouraged us to be creative, so we’ll see how it goes.

 

 

Both of these challenges are great practices for the writing life!

Visit Khara and/or Jane Ann and join in the fun. It’s not too late! And please do come back here tomorrow to see where the memory lane leads me first!

 

 

Monday Discovery—Link to Mixed Metaphor: “Intersections”

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

Today’s discovery?

I’m keeping it in the family and sharing the link to my daughter-in-law Larissa Parson‘s blog entry, “Intersections,” posted Friday, September 7.  She doesn’t get to post as often as she would like. Here’s why:

Larissa teaches English at a private high school in San Francisco. And she and husband Geoff (my husband’s son) are the proud parents of 20-month-old twin boys!

Busy? 

You bet. But occasionally, she shares her life and wisdom on her Mixed Metaphor blog. In this most recent post, she writes about how her teaching life intersects with her life as a mom–how each experience informs the other. Here’s a taste:

Communicating with our children in a respectful way about what the boundaries and rules are and are not frees them to explore their world. And I’ve seen for myself how amazingly effective this practice is. I’ve become the unhelpful mommy on the playground; if they can’t get on it themselves, they can’t do it (Except for swings. Because swings are so fun.) . . . .

I want to try to bring the same empathy I practice with my kids to my classroom. I want to meet students where they are and understand what’s frustrating about a tough text, and celebrate what’s great about understanding a tough text . . . .

Here are Larissa’s primary “informers” at home.

Twins, wrestling
Photo courtesy of Larissa Parson

Retro: The Writerly Review, June 17–23

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

Here’s what happened at The Writerly Life this past week:

Cane chair in sunlight

The week kicked off with with the Sunday Wordle: June 17. (Playing around with words is such fun: no agenda, no 300 pages to revise, no agent search . . . . Ahhh.) This wordplay resulted in a poem, of all things. The Wordles, in case you don’t know about them, come from The Sunday Whirl. If you’re a writer looking for a fun way to loosen up the brain, go to The Whirl and give the Wordles a try. They work for fiction, memoir, poetry (and blog posts!) . . . whatever strikes your fancy.

Monday Discovery: Mellow Yellow Monday— Mellow Yellow Monday challenges photographers to come up with something yellow. This week? Sunflowers! We’ll see how many more yellows I can come up with.

The week ended with a bang:  Read It and Weep (Not) deals with the role and responsibilities of the reader–which are considerable–in a writing partnership or group. This post grew into a two-parter. . .

Read It and Weep (Not), Part 2: The Writer’s Role offers the other side of the critique scene: the writer’s part, whose work is “at stake” in the feedback scenario.  

So if you haven’t checked out this week’s posts, I hope you will.

There’s a great conversation going on in response to Read It and Weep (Not) and Read It and Weep (Not), Part 2 regarding how writers share work. I hope you’ll enter in by leaving a comment. I’m learning so much from my readers!

Have a great weekend, y’all!