Sorry I have been absent the last few weeks. Life may imitate art or art may imitate life but sometimes life just gets me down. Then I get into a funk and stop doing much of anything creatively. I have to dig myself out of the pit, again.  I’m getting better at not beating myself up when I’m down but I really want to figure out how to let the rhythm of my ups and downs continue yet not have the downs be such a disruption to my art.

I’m several classes into a writing certificate from the Mid-Continent Public Library (mymcpl.org) which is the library for almost the entire metropolitan Kansas City area on the Missouri side. They have funding from the Kaufman Foundation and offer some excellent classes, many on zoom. Last night the class was Resources for Storytellers and mentioned several books to help with storytelling, particularly oral storytelling. This got me searching for books on storytelling, first from the class list at the public library, then a more general search on Amazon which led me to Audible which led me to a bunch of podcasts; which led to “Writing Excuses” by Dan and Amal Howard and Mary Robinette.  I listened to the episode called “A Time to Rhyme” (episode 16.17). They mentioned a poem by Wendy Cope called “The Orange” that I highly recommend and the limericks of Edward Lear, the most famous of which is about an old man with a beard; from this inspiration blended with my life I wrote these two limericks.  Hope you like them.

 A limerick has the form of 5 anapestic lines. Lines 1,2,5 have seven to 10 syllables and rhyme with one another. Lines 3 and 4 have five to seven syllables and also rhyme with each other.