Quack Up

Long live the cryptids!

My work is a lot like Bigfoot.

It’s out there, but doesn’t get seen very often.

Think about it. Writing a piece that may be viewed a handful of times is a sort of creative passionate madness.

Shared Madness.

Public Domain

I can write a plot driven narrative.

Yet, somewhere eventually, the pantser in me kicks in and the way-out is on the way in. Often, I revise back the forests of writing mechanics and find a delightful cryptid hanging out on some misplaced punctuation mark.

I have to blame The University of Iowa International Writing Program for my style.

Way back, the IWP offered creative distance-learning spaces called MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses - in various literary areas. Poetry worked with my schedule back then and I dove into my first MOOC and wrote lots of bad rhymes.

Yet, the sounds of poetry - repetition, rhyme, alliteration and assonance - stayed with me and honestly, if I don’t see at least one component of poetic magic in my work - it falls flat for me.

The MOOCs - did I mention these were offered at no cost then … and now?

Several years of MOOC-Packs are housed within the MOOC-Pack Library at the Digital Learning IWP website.

How Writers Write Poetry I (and Poetry II) as well as Fiction I and II - among others - are available for individual use.

And for Walt Whitman fans, he is the lead course of the MOOC-Pack.

Become part of the MOOC pack here.

Photo by Alyssa Eakin on Unsplash

The IWP influence is the story behind most of my stories, including Quack Up.

The quirky (quacky) piece was published by Bending Genres online October 15, 2019. Thank you, editors Robert Vaughan and Meg Tuite.

Bending Genres offers such exceptional on trend writing workshops. Sign up for the newsletter and check out what’s coming up here.

Read Quack Up here.