Another New Humor Publication. And This One Has a Really Interesting Backstory. With a Moral.

The college paper 

Today Jane Austen's Wastebasket published my latest humor piece, Does "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear Support Our Community's Values? Now, I know that I think everything I write has an interesting backstory, and I am always right about that. But this is a particularly good story.

Last month, I started to clean out my writing files, thinking I would get rid of old starts that I'm not interested in anymore to make more room in the filing cabinet for new work. I didn't get far because the first thing I found was my notebook from my college expository writing class. So, of course, I have to look through it. And what do I find but something called "The Subversive Aspects of The Owl And The Pussycat:  Including A Discussion Of Its Influences On Youth, Sexual Mores, And Society As A Whole."

Now this was a redneck kid's attempt to write a parody of an academic paper, something she didn't know a whole lot about even though she was, indeed, a college undergraduate. The piece is also now very dated, claiming the Owl and the Pussycat's guitar was an influence on a generation of folksingers and the dancing on the edge of the sand at the end "inspired a whole flock of C beach movies." But at the time the instructor was kind.

More importantly, I looked at this thing last month and said to myself, "You can do something with this."

What I did was reframe it and bring it up to date. It is no longer a parody of an academic paper but a parody of a book complaint to a librarian. Instead of hitting on folksingers and movies, it hits on religion and gay couples. The only carry overs from the original are the concerns about money and the Owl and the Pussycat being alone together while unmarried. Money and pre-marital sex are timeless.

I didn't get far with my file cleaning, because I found two more manuscripts I think I can rework for a humor piece and an essay. One is from the graduate-level essay writing class I took a long time ago, and I don't know how long ago I wrote the other one. I have the typed manuscript. It's probably from a couple of computers back and saved somewhere if I only knew where to find it.

I promised you a moral. It's a moral for writers. Never throw away work.