Here's What I'm Driving At

I started blogging accidentally in August last year. A writing conference was coming up, and I was checking out a workshop leader who had a blog. I saw an icon on her page and clicked on it. Suddenly Blogger had me by the hand. In that brief, awkward first post, I wrote about my demented mother. Bloggers welcomed me to the community and I felt increasingly at home.

It has nearly been a year, my mother has shuffled off this mortal coil, and I'm getting ready for another writers conference, this one up in the Santa Cruz area. I've dusted off my novel, a book for young people called "The Enchanted Oak," and I'm heading out with it under my arm. I almost never write fiction anymore, but that novel defined a special part of my life. I had just moved back to the small town where I was born, my beloved sister-in-law had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I began to tell her a story in weekly chapters about a very special tree I had known as a girl in the country.

In a few weeks I'll take that book to the conference and look at it through the eyes of people who specialize in children's lit. I don't have anything more pressing to do now. For five years, I've been watching over my mother. Both she and I have been released.

Sometimes life has a lovely circularity to it. When my mother moved to this town as a little girl, she was in ecstasy to discover its Carnegie library. When I was a little girl, she took me there and turned me loose week after week to check out as many books as I liked. I met Babar the Elephant, Dr. Seuss, Nancy Drew, John Steinbeck, and many friends there.

But first I'm driving the world-famous Poetry Bus for the best blogger on earth, the Totalfeckineejit. Last night I gave great thought to this week's challenge. Really. I worked hard for more than an hour and burned up many calories. Here's what I came up with:

Please choose one of these nearly century-old photographs and write a poem about it.

Eugène Atget
Etang de Corot, Ville-d'Avray, 1900-1910

Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O'Keeffe--Hands, 1919

If you've posted a poem for the Bus, go here to my latest post and tell me. That's where you'll find our fellow riders too.