Wordgrove Post & Review

Quoted in the Grove:

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
~Flannery O’Connor

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
~Russel Lynes

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin. ~Stanislaw J Lec

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These are the cynical words of seasoned writers, and there is a truth to them for those who demand excellence in their reading. There are writers to satisfy them, and this is as it should be. Wordgrove, however, is about opening doors and not closing them, about providing a platform for writers, about encouraging anyone wanting to write and helping when possible

Wordgrove has used a writing contest in the past to further these goals, and has been encouraged to do so again by club members. There’s been time slippage (the contest is both late and shortened), with a reduction in prize money, but the contest for the Wordgrove Prize is on!

All that remains to launch this year’s contest is to announce the theme so that imaginations can be turned loose to do what they will with it. Here then, this year’s theme:

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It might be a matter of great moment taken from history or experience, be the result of a birth or death, is certainly prominent at the beginnings of love and at the end of it. It could be heart-pounding world-hopping adventure or the inferno that burns in silence. Discovery of any kind, doors of memory opening, too much of something or too little of it, events imagined or witnessed. The world grows by it and is over-full of it. Life is gravid with it, fairly vibrates with it, so that writers are challenged to capture and channel this electricity of life we call Drama

Drama keeps the world from boredom just as it puts it at danger. Perhaps our choice is over-broad, but no matter because our theme for the 2013 Wordgrove Prize is: Drama

Following whatever instinct, path or thrill that Drama conjures up for you, your challenge is to harness this energy, to shape it and breathe into it and give it the magic of life with words. You may enter one piece in each of three categories: Poetry, Prose, and Journal (diary or blog entry, dated essay/etc). The soft deadline is Sun 1/20, when voting begins

Tables will be in place for early drops beginning on, Sun 1/13. Early drops work better for vote getting. A table will be provided for those who want to participate but don’t wish to enter the voting. Complete instructions will be provided in a blue Script on a red stand near Writers Platform

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Posted from the Grove:
Prewritten for Thurs (1/3/13) 5 pm Pacific/8 Eastern is: Alaska, rope

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@Writers Platform: *a previous review
Library Table:

~Greenie: A’Glow*, and Silent Song*, and:
Evening’s Silent Song
An idyll of pastoral serenity lacking only someone to share it; an Eden that begins with Eve alone

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Prewritten: gift, tiding
~BarTalk: Spirit of Xmas

Impromptu: rain, rust

~Piffin: .Elemental Me.
Non-standard elements of nature, the brine of tears and blood and dust fuse into cold organic rust; non-standard rhyme scheme, outlines on a sidewalk in a portrait of broken trust

~Stejovis: rain, rust
A game in the rain can only mean football; paper cups disintegrating, spilling yours, wearing another’s beer in the rain and loving it

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Writers in Residence:
WG Nutters have been going thru drawers and old files looking for old favorites to bring out in their pazs while beginning work on their contest pieces. Haven’t they.

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