5/7 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

The winning entry for last week’s prompt, “view from the window,” is an untitled poem submitted by Elizabeth Campbell:

I come late
to nature

I am not

a climber of mountains
a spelunker of caves
a diver of oceans

except within these walls,
where I weave webs that
keep me close to home

watching through windows
with wanting
the wind, the dark, the leaves
familiar and foreign, alive.

Congratulations, Elizabeth! Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate will be arriving shortly. Don’t spend it all at once! 🙂

This week, I am also posting two other entries (both short prose pieces), one from a regular blog contributor (Jenn), and one from an occasional commenter (Juliet Bell). Click on “continue reading” below to read those entries.

This week’s prompt: “A cup of coffee.”
Use the prompt however you like. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by midnight on Tuesday, May 13. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. Writers should include their submission directly in the body text of their e-mail. Visual artists and photographers should attach an image of their work as a jpeg. Enter as often as you like; multiple submissions for a single prompt are welcome. There is no limit to how many times you can win the weekly contest, either. (You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter. All are invited to participate.) Remember, the point here is to stimulate your output, not to create a masterpiece. Keep the bar low and see what happens. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

From Jenn:

The view from the window has always been troublesome. It’s the one thing I don’t like about my space. Imagine, a beautiful faculty office, arguably the best in our department, one of the only ones with a window, and the view looks like this. It’s not my fault, there was a flood upstairs. Water poured down, along with dissolved wallboard and God only knows what else. If it had just coated the inside of the window, I could have cleaned it. If it dripped down on the outside, the rain would have more or less washed it away. But instead, the window is double-paned, and the water ran in between the sheets of glass. No amount of scrubbing – inside or outside – can remove the mottled, dingy appearance. It’s the first thing my students see when they walk into my office. Well, the window and the life sized foam model of a dog, sans head, that my daughter picked out of the trash. It must have been discarded by the Biology Department upstairs where the flood happened. They don’t do organismal biology any more. There is no such thing as an animal or plant, only genes and cells. The dog is my barometer for how much I want students to go away. If I’m in a good mood, I put Chimy (my daughter’s name for it and for every other thing her two year old brain thinks to name) behind the door, facing away. If I’m a little stressed, I turn him around to face the door. If I want to axe murder any student who dares cross my threshold, Chimy becomes a guard dog; he’s right in the doorway, headless imaginary teeth bared for all to see. Oh, that, and the dirty window. I sometimes try to think of an appropriate analogy for the window. Triumphing in the face of adversity? The AA prayer about accepting the things you can’t change? The irony of life that I have a window in my office but it is both filthy and it looks out at the loading zone where they store and remove trash for the entire building? Nah. Sometimes a dirty window is just a dirty window. And the view has always been a sore spot.

From Juliet Bell:

Most days when I am in the house, my binoculars are nearby. Something catches my eye out in the yard or my dog growls and I am ready. I am addicted to watching the outside world. A week or so ago the cowbirds arrived, announcing their presence with their shrill call. The cowbird is mostly disliked – they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, primarily songbirds, and the young – early hatchers, dispense with their rivals one way or another. But I have a love-hate relationship with this bird. Like me, they grow up adopted – well cared for, but among strange folk none the less. I watch as the cowbirds flock around the feeder, no doubt hungry from their journey. Then I notice a young female at a distance rooting around on the ground. She cocks her head, then digs into the soil and comes up with a worm. I remember her. Last summer she wandered over the yard with her adoptive parents nearby, digging for worms. Cowbirds don’t eat worms as a rule. She has returned to her birthplace. I wonder as I watch, if she will always favor this robins’ diet – the diet of her adopted upbringing. Will the nurturing that sustained her in her youth remain that which makes her unique? Or will she answer one day to a deeper call and favor seeds, just as she will no doubt, lay her eggs in another bird’s nest. I put the glasses down and sigh.

Thank you to all participants!