Bobcaygeon

#28 by The Tragically Hip

I’m so thankful that Annette Sharp was willing to jump into the Headliner spot last week with such short notice. She picked a great prompt! I really enjoyed writing my own, and reading all the Time After Time, by Cyndi Lauper, submissions. And I’m excited about this week’s prompt, Headlined by Bill Ferguson 🇨🇦, too!

How would you like to pick our prompt? Find out how to join our revolving list of Headliners here.

Week #27 Feature🏆

This week’s Feature goes to Gray, for her submission titled, Incubation. Time After Time, Grace surprises me with a essay or story that I didn’t see coming — a take on the prompt, that leaves me wandering off after her…

I’ve published 60,000+ words on Substack since June. And there are a few more thousand in the hopper. I actually went down the rabbit hole of counting all those words the other day after having a conversation with a friend about whether or not I can finish writing this book I started… in June.

Incubation

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Wanna read more Feature 🏆 Award Winners? I’ve created an Awards Page to serve as an index for all our Featured Stories!

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Here’s this week’s prompt, Bobcaygeon, by The Tragically Hip!

Calling all Poets, Fiction, or Non-Fiction writers that love music — Share your prose of 1500 words or less, using the prompt, Bobcaygeon.

Remember:

• Each Tuesday I’ll publish a newsletter with that week’s song prompt — along with a featured writer’s submission from the previous week.

• Anyone is then free to run with it! Just add the link to your story or prose in the comments of this newsletter.

• Subscribers to Stories from the Jukebox, also have a chance to be featured in the following week’s newsletter. And I’ll do my best to give feedback and restack each submission.

There’s always rules:

1. All forms of prose are welcome, just keep it under 1500 words.

2. Submissions must be published by midnight on Monday.

3. Submissions must include a tag/link to this week’s Song Prompt Newsletter embedded within the post.

   While anyone is welcome to add their post in the comments at any time — all rules must be followed for a post to be eligible to be featured or shared.

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"Bobcaygeon" is a song by Canadian rock band the Tragically Hip. It was released in February 1999 as a single from their sixth album, Phantom Power, and has come to be recognized as one of the band's most enduring and beloved signature songs. (Via Wikipedia)

The song's narrator works in the city as a police officer, a job he finds stressful and sometimes ponders quitting, but unwinds from the stress and restores his spirit by spending his weekends with a loved one in the rural idyll of Bobcaygeon, where he sees "the constellations/reveal themselves one star at a time" in contrast to the city's "dull and hypothetical" skies that are "falling one cloud at a time".

In live performances, Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie typically explained "Bobcaygeon" as a "cop love song," though the identity of the narrator's beloved changed from performance to performance.

The song is named after Bobcaygeon, Ontario, a town in the Kawartha Lakes region about 160 kilometres (99 mi) northeast of Toronto. But according to Downie, the song was not specifically written about the town itself, but rather any small town would have worked for the theme and he settled on "Bobcaygeon" primarily because it was the only place name he could find that came close to rhyming with "constellation".

However, the song has still resulted in the town of Bobcaygeon coming to occupy what has been described as a "mythical" place in Canada's collective imagination, as the archetype of a Canadian cottage country paradise.

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Our prompt this week was chosen by Bill Ferguson 🇨🇦 . Bill is no doubt sharing his Canadian roots with us again this week. I love it! And I’m a big fan of Bill’s writing. His latest favorite of mine is his ongoing, Farm Kids Stories. This is the latest one.

Here’s this week’s Headliner, A Better Place To Be!

As a Canadian I feel duty bound to choose a song from my homeland. This week’s choice is Bobcaygeon by the Tragically Hip.

Bobcaygeon is a small town in Central Ontario, about 90 minutes from Toronto. It is a gateway to many lakes in Central Ontario.

Bob stood at the railing on a night with clear skies. He could hear the gentle lapping of the water on the shore. His eyes were fixed on the northern lights that shone in the distance, lending an intriguing moment as a finale to the night. The gently pulsating rhythms he felt in the waves across the sky were touching him deeply.

A Better Place To Be

“Hey you! Are you coming back to bed soon?” said Karla enticingly as she wrapped her arms around him from behind. “We don’t have much time left together.”

I’m so excited to see what y’all come up with this week!

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