yeah write virgins!

There were two virgins on the grid this week! Thank you to everyone who’s been spreading the good word of yeah write and thanks to the virgins for working your way around the grid. Please join us again next week.

jury prize winner—invitational grid

“His Shoes” by Jennifer at Treading Water in the Kiddie Pool

With the challenge grid going back to open submission madness, this week, some bloggers forgot that what makes a winning yeah write post is a story, plain and simple. Jennifer at Treading Water in the Kiddie Pool didn’t forget. In a short and sweet vignette about the simple act of cleaning out her son’s closet, Jennifer filled her post with emotional impact and scurries away with our yeah write invitational grid jury prize this week.

 From a stark one-line first paragraph that tugs us in, she made an everyday act—cleaning out a kid’s room full of outgrown clothes—into a sublime meditation on letting the kite string out as our children grow more independent and need us less. It’s hard to have a fresh take on something so universally experienced by parents, so when we see another post about parenting, and kids, and mommyhood, it’s easy for us to start to skim. Jennifer slowed down our reading with descriptors that set the scene and the mood, so when she went for the gut in fifth paragraph, we were hers. Footie pajamas were no longer just utilitarian sleepwear—“like magic, the fabric in my fingers expanded from its two dimensions to three.” Our objects have the power to trigger movies in our minds; to tell stories themselves.

So by the time we got to the shoes, well, the jury was a mess. We urge people to “walk a mile” in someone’s shoes; we tell them that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Neil Armstrong takes “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Shoes—smelly goddamn kids’ shoes that are always littered all over our entryways—tell so many stories of our kids and where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Times past, time passing. A lifetime elapsing, bittersweet, yet hopeful. Jennifer’s post uses symbolism and story at its finest.

Congrats, Jennifer, on the win.

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crowd favorite and top row five—challenge grid

Congrats, Kathleen of Michigan Left, for winning this week’s challenge grid crowd favorite with your entry Hockey Skates and a Not-So-Lucky Cat.

Kathleen’s fertile tchotchke

Part of the top row five? Congratulations! Please help yourselves to your winners’ badges. 

Win-win

The thumbnails are now sorted in the grid from most votes to the least. In the case of a tie, the thumbnails are additionally sorted by page views.

Do not be discouraged if your blog has landed near the bottom of the grid; it is always a tight race. The fun lies in getting better exposure for your blog and in the spirit of competition as incentive to improve your writing and blogging skills. It’s a win-win for everybody involved.

Thanks again, everybody, for linking up, for reading, for accepting the weekly writing challenge. And for making yeah write the most welcoming spot on the Interwebs for writers who blog and bloggers who write.

Yeah write #93 weekly writing challenge grid opens Tuesday.

Tell your friends. Bring us your best stuff. See you then.

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