Monthly Archives: March 2016

nan lundeen, non-fiction

last call!

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Wood violet on woodland path at Paris Mountain. April 2014
Wood violet on woodland path at Paris Mountain. April 2014

Will you rise to the challenge of writing a poem a day during April? So far, five of us are in—Adamy Damaris Diaz, Jacquelyn Weddington, Cindy Carver Hosea, Cathy Zellmann and me. Choose a theme (which can be changed up to mid-month). Adamy is looking at “Memory Lane.” Cathy may choose “Places.” I’ve already changed mine—as a warm-up exercise I’ve been writing a poem a day and discovered I can’t keep to a topic. Instead, I need to write what the Muse inspires, so I’m thinking of changing my theme from goddesses to something less specific. We’d be happy to consider publishing the poems you wish to share here at mooingaround.com. Happy writing!

non-fiction

a challenge

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This cow has graduated her Moo of Writing course.
This cow has graduated her Moo of Writing course.

Will you join me in a challenge? In my handbook, Moo of Writing, I advocate a belief in abundance. We can all be like Linus in the pumpkin patch, believing with all our heart that a great pumpkin bursting with the seeds of prolific writing will descend upon us, indeed lives within us every day! I am now throwing down a challenge to myself—and I invite you to join me—to enter a contest. We will pick a theme and write one poem a day every day for the month of April for a total of 30 poems in honor of National Poetry Month. The contest is sponsored by localgemspoetrypress.com, and they want $25 from you by March 25 to enter. If you choose not to enter the contest, but want to participate, send me your poems through this website by May 1, and we’ll choose some to publish here. Usually, I spend weeks if not months on a poem, keeping several in the hopper at once, returning to them to reconsider, putting them through critiquing workshops, mulling them over, sleeping on them. In April, I will allow myself no such luxury of time. Winner of the contest receives $300 and Local Gems Press publishes the winner’s chapbook. I’m excited about the challenge. Time to see how well Moo of Writing really works! Moo/Mu!

non-fiction

the ant in the oatmeal

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The Ant in the Oatmeal

Did it swim when I poured water on it and stirred the pot? Did it die with its mouth open, gulping oatmeal it had unluckily chosen as a home?

We keep our oatmeal, supposedly safe from invaders, in the plastic bag it comes from the health food store in with a twister around it on a metal rack among pots, mostly large soup pots and a pasta kettle. I suppose the black, mid-size, luckless ant contorted his body to squeeze past the twister and landed there in an oatmeal daze: plentiful food—do ants even eat oatmeal?—but no way of escape until a large hand untwisted the bag. With a twist of fate, the hand measured a stainless steel one-third cup of oatmeal, unknowingly containing the ant, into a pan on the stove, added two-thirds cup water, turned on the flame, stirred, and there he was floating like a miserable hull, scrunched into smaller anthood than surely he had intended, if he had, indeed, planned to eat his fill daily of fresh, tasty oatmeal.

It was an ignominious end for he was dumped into the trash along with the contaminated oatmeal from the pan and the whole bag, wasted all for the greed or was it ant curiosity, of such a tiny critter who may not have been greedy at all, but simply hungry.

As the human who hastened his demise, I cast about for some meaning from all this. I’ve got nothing except that this morning I had Cheerios for breakfast.