Oh no! It’s almost April 1! #SOLC20 #SOL20

I’ve been so caught up in slicing, Schooling from Home-ing, and just putting one foot in front of the other each morning, that I completely forgot Wednesday is April 1st! As the 2020 SOLC comes to an end, National Poetry Month begins and that means another daily writing and sharing challenge. This time it will be a poem a day!

But what will my theme be this year? Two years ago, my first year participating, it was all things vernal pool-related. I had a blast with that theme, and I’m even retooling some of the poems I created that month so they might be published as a collection. Last year I teamed up with several Poetry Friday pals and we used “Playing with Poetry” as our theme, using tools such as Haiku and Metaphor Dice, magnetic poetry, paint chips, and nail polish colors for inspiration. This was hard, really hard. Much harder than we thought.

It finally came to me last evening in an a-ha moment, if you will. Thoreauly Inspired.  Each day during the month of April, I will write a poem inspired by a word or phrase mined from the pages of Henry David Thoreau’s jewel-laden journals. I’ll leave my challenge open in that the poems may take any form (haiku, free verse, borrowed line, blackout) and who knows which direction they will go in.  I learned from the first year that wide open is better. I paid the price for not following that guidance last year.

Where did the idea come from? Two places. First, walking. Since our Covid Quarantine began, my husband and I have been taking walks daily, many of which are in Thoreau territory — the towns of Lincoln, Concord, and Sudbury, and along the Assabet, Concord, and Sudbury rivers. (Notice the absence of Walden Pond? It’s mobbed, so we are keeping our distance for now.) And second, volunteering for the nearby Walden Woods Project‘s Thoreau Animal Index Blitz last month. Working with other volunteers, both in person at the Project’s headquarters in Lincoln, Massachusetts and remotely, we combed through the pages of Thoreau’s magnificent journals looking for animal references. This new resource, when tidied up a bit, will be a goldmine of information for Thoreau scholars worldwide.

So there it is. Beginning April 1, #ThoreaulyInspired. We shall see what happens!

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Thanks for wondering and wandering a bit with me today. Many thanks to the crew at Two Writing Teachers, and the extended SOL community, for giving us the time, space, and encouragement to live the writerly life here every Tuesday throughout the year and daily during the month of March. One more day!