Supporting Muscatine writers since 1990
Our next monthly meeting is Tuesday, March 14 in the Student Center at Muscatine Community College. The words for the monthly word challenge are listed below. Incorporate all of these words into a story, poem, essay, song, or whatever kind of writing you choose, and bring copies to share. Can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!
Writers on the Avenue is seeking submissions for an inspirational anthology that celebrates the human spirit and the simple beauty of the everyday. Lighthearted or soulful, tender or profound, we are looking for works about hope, miracles, or triumph over adversity, words that lift our spirits, soothe our hurts, strengthen our courage, and soften our hearts. Send us your poems, stories, essays, short plays, photos, or original art.
Multiple submissions will be considered. Please indicate if the work is a simultaneous submission or reprint. Send materials by April 30, 2017, to our email address or by using the contact form below. Include your name, phone number, email or mailing address, and a 50-100 word bio.
Contributors will receive a free copy and retain all rights. Book sales will support WOTA’s efforts to foster the literary arts in Muscatine and the surrounding areas.
We look forward to reading your work!
Our next WOTA meeting will be January 10, 2017, at 6:00 pm in the Student Center at Muscatine Community College. Hope to see you there!
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are words for our January word challenge. Write a song, poem, essay, or story (or whatever you like) incorporating all of these words, and bring copies to share. See you there!
blessing, patience, applesauce, surgeon, hammerhead, stormy, beaches, cactus, tarnish, revive, magnificence, and pudding.
The next WOTA meeting is Tuesday, December 13 starting at 6:00 pm in the Student Center at Muscatine Community College. Hope you can join us! We’ll have copies of the holiday anthology to distribute; come grab a few copies to gift to friends and family and sell to the other people in your life.
As always, bring work to share. If you’re looking for inspiration, the word list we generated at the November meeting includes:
Lace, lice, corn, acorn, lopsided, goosebumps, advantage effort, afford, gratitude, memory, evolve.
I love those word lists mostly as a snapshot of whatever is going on in peoples’ minds at the moment. Hope you can join us! Bring a pen and bring a friend!
Writing the Mystery is TONIGHT from 6-8 on the MCC campus, 27 Strahan Hall! Bring a pen and bring a friend. The event is free and open to the public. The only expense for you is getting there, and the books you’ll want to buy from these terrific authors. I haven’t written a mystery story since eighth grade, but after tonight, I just might be inspired–and I hope you will be, too.
It’s time for another WOTA anthology, and this time we’re preparing a special volume celebrating holidays in and around Muscatine. We’re looking for prose, poetry, art, songs, or anything else reflecting on holidays in the City of Pearls, past or present.
Submissions are due October 15, and we hope to have a printed volume to sell by Thanksgiving. All proceeds will benefit WOTA activities and events.
Click here for the full specs, and contact us if you have any questions. We can’t wait to read your work!
Lots of great things happening for Writers on the Avenue this month! First, you can see the cast of our poem selected in the Muscatine County Arts Council Wandering Words contest over at the City of Muscatine blog. The poem will be stamped into new cement around town as sidewalk squares are laid or repaired. What a great way for Muscatine to show that it is a good home for the literary arts.
Join us for our next monthly meeting on Tuesday, August 9, from 6 – 8 p.m. in the Student Center lounge on the Muscatine Community College campus. Bring a couple pages of a work to share, or cook up a poem, story, essay, or song using our word challenge. The words we generated at the last meeting are:
Equipment
Birth
Plug
Landscape
Reminiscing
Frantic
Bubbles
Wonderment
Etch
Musician
Have fun, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
At our June meeting, we brainstormed this list of words for next month’s word challenge:
Fireworks
Useful
Pudding
Tatter
Help
Fact
Jazz
Barn
Magnificence
Rumbled
Intertwine these into a song, poem, essay, story, or mixed media work of your choice, and bring copies to our next meeting on Tuesday, June 12, from 6 – 8 in the Student Center at Muscatine Community College. Come back to this page to hear what people have done with previous prompts!
For our May word play, we generated a list of nouns and a list of verbs. Your challenge is to pick one noun and one verb and build a story, essay, poem, or song around them.
mountainside, sombrero, rain, pocketbook, speaker, violin, driver, frost
elude, charge, linger, meet, start, change, taste
Bring your work to the next meeting. We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with!
Writers on the Avenue