{"id":300,"date":"2014-11-13T18:09:13","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/?p=300"},"modified":"2014-11-13T18:09:13","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:09:13","slug":"alphaday-4-season-xi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/alphaday-4-season-xi\/","title":{"rendered":"Alphaday 4 &#8211; Season XI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Alphas,<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to Alphaday 4, Season XI.<\/p>\n<p>The season is now in full swing and we\u2019ve no sooner polished off one challenge and marvelled at the variety of takes on what seemed like a simple brief, than another one rolls in demanding attention and inspired, well-crafted writing; add that to our other activities and we are busy!<\/p>\n<p>The great thing about it is the satisfaction we get from writing\u2026 and the pleasure of being able to pat ourselves approvingly on our backs. We deserve it!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You\u2019ve provided a very nice line-up of treats for this Alphaday\u2018s agenda \u2013 as follows:<\/p>\n<p>This bulletin from me as per usual<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The LOG which I\u2019ll send out this time<\/li>\n<li>The results of challenge 2 (Thinking outside the box) from Chris<\/li>\n<li>The collated entries for challenge 3 (an accident) from Olaf<\/li>\n<li>The brief for challenge 4 from Rosemary (already in!)<\/li>\n<li>And finally: perhaps even a showcase piece sent out by Suzanne<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you look at the agenda and have a little think about how much inspired and creative writing from all our members has gone into putting that together you might feel quite overawed. At least I do, because I think it\u2019s a privilege to have so many brilliant writers sharing their different approaches to the business and pleasure of writing.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the above\u2026 there are the pieces of writing I\u2019m trying (slowly and laboriously) to collect from you all for our Ten Years of Alpha publication. (I had to slip that in somewhere as I\u2019m still waiting for contributions!)<\/p>\n<p>We really enjoy our challenges. There was plenty of constructive feedback for the photo challenge, but further \u2013 more personal \u2013 anecdotes came out in the weeks that followed. It\u2019s interesting to see how inspirational a simple photo can be.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u00a0***<\/p>\n<p>In the last bulletin I mentioned the Man Booker Prize.<\/p>\n<p>This time I feel like mentioning a much more modest literary event that caught my eye as I leafed through the December issue of Writers\u2019 News.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Waitrose did a survey to find the (UK) nation\u2019s favourite children\u2019s poem. This was in connection with National Poetry Day on the 2<sup>nd<\/sup> of October. (We\u2019ll be writing poetry for our next challenge, so I thought you might be interested.)<\/p>\n<p>There were 2,000 participants and they chose the following poems:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Top Ten Poems from Childhood<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol>\n<li>The Owl &amp; the Pussycat &#8211; Edward Lear (1871)<\/li>\n<li>Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star &#8211; Jane Taylor (1806)<\/li>\n<li>Humpty Dumpty &#8211; Anonymous (1797)<\/li>\n<li>Jabberwocky &#8211; Lewis Carroll (1872)<\/li>\n<li>Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) &#8211; William Wordsworth (1804)<\/li>\n<li>A visit from St. Nicholas (\u2018Twas the night before Christmas) &#8211; Clement Clarke Moore (1823)<\/li>\n<li>There was an Old Lady who swallowed a fly &#8211; Rose Bonne (1953)<\/li>\n<li>The Grand Old Duke of York &#8211; Anonymous (1642)<\/li>\n<li>Jack and Jill &#8211; Anonymous (1765)<\/li>\n<li>Hickory Dickory Dock &#8211; Anonymous (1744)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The first thing that struck me was #5. How did that end up amongst the rest? I started to wonder about what exactly makes you remember a poem fondly that you heard when you were a child. Might it simply be because it was repeated so many times that it stuck in your memory? Could that explain the Daffodils?<\/p>\n<p>Funnily enough those same Daffodils have turned up in our challenges. I\u2019ve even used them myself in a story (as you may find out). It\u2019s definitely not a nursery rhyme, but it\u2019s quoted so frequently that \u2018a host of golden daffodils\u2019 have become <em>the <\/em>poetic reference that we all have in common\u2026 even though most people may not have the faintest idea of what comes before or after. In the same way, perhaps, that most people don\u2019t know what comes before or after <em>To be or not to be.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Countering this argument is #4, <em>Jabberwocky. <\/em>We all know it and most of us love it, but can we quote from it? Rattle it off as we\u2019d do <em>Humpty Dumpty<\/em> and others?<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll confess to not remembering ever coming across #6.<\/p>\n<p>I also wonder whether they were deliberately trying to make a point about favourite nursery rhymes all being well over a century old. Because we all love some fairly modern ones\u2026 don\u2019t we?<\/p>\n<p>My own children can still rattle off many lines from <em>Now We Are Six. <\/em>There was another one about a baby that went down the plughole!<\/p>\n<p>Christine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Alphas, Welcome to Alphaday 4, Season XI. The season is now in full swing and we\u2019ve no sooner polished off one challenge and marvelled at the variety of takes on what&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphaday-bulletins","tag-alphaday-bulletins-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}