Putting the Collective back into W4tB

A few years back, you couldn't turn a corner and not hear somebody talking about the Waiting 4 the Bus collective.  Mostly this had to do with our efforts to be omnipresent in an "In Your Face" kinda way.  The rest of this had to do with us biting off more than we can chew.

At one point we were running the Open Mic, The First Friday Poetry Showcase, and The Fifth Monday Show.  The were all different and we believed in them all.  Add to that trying to organize the Poetry Bomb and making it look spontaneous (like a flash mob on steroids) and putting together the Poetry Pentathlon and publishing Exact Change Only.

We were capable of juggling all those things for a while, but Accidents, Tragedy, and Geography sent us into a tail spin.

I'd love to bring some of those concepts back.  I've been focusing on what has always been the core of W4tB...The Open Mic.

We have had a bunch of venues, changed time slots and formats and hosts, blabbity blah.  The Open Mic is out constant our rock and our core.  Everything else has to come from the mutual "Wanna" (as in "do You Wanna build a snowman, Do you Wanna hold an Pentathlon? Do you wanna write a poem as a collective?)

There are many folks who have the Wanna but not the direction, I guess I want W4tB to have that direction.  I miss group projects, but group projects take writers, and editors, and readers, and venues, and bookings to perform the end product.  To utter clichés.  "No one is an Island" & "It takes a Village".

In my head 2016 is about rebuilding the infrastructure of that village and going out and making poetry happen.  I am wary of biting off more than we can chew and burning out, but to quote other clichés "Rome was not built in a day" & "One day at a time".

If you have any ideas, concepts, group prompts (That's prompts in the W4tB manner of prompts)  leave a comment or ,  get me at weirdowatch1@gmail.com.  If you're not local and want to play, That's cool.  We are not short on talent for the live performance and we have used substitute readers before.

If you want to know more stuff or keep up with projects we may be undertaking join our band of Weirdos on the FaceBook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/waiting4thebus/

also, you can catch some of the best Weirdos doing our thing on Dec 3rd at the Uptown Arts Center

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