The March 2011 Challenge
This website contains entries to all previous Commuter Challenges. From this diverse collection, select an illustration, poem, or prose writing — just about anything that has been submitted to the Commuter Challenge by someone other than yourself. If you selected a text entry, then create an illustration for it; on the other hand, if you selected an illustration, write a poem or an appropriate bit of prose to accompany it.
The Results
Brian Raiter
(Illustration for Ryan Finholm’s six-word story for September 2008.
Ryan Finholm
(Illustration for Brian Raiter’s nonsense poem for February 2011.
I spent a fair bit of time spinning my wheels on this challenge. There’s so much material here, but for some reason I couldn’t think of anything that really called out for embellishment. Or at least not in form of an illustration in the limited styles that I’m capable of. (Eric Waldow’s nonsense poem cries out for an illustration or two, but done by somebody with more skill than I have.) I guess that’s why I finally settled on the six-word story: It of necessity has plenty of room for embellishment.
Instead of clarifying the story behind those six words, I chose rather to follow some of the associations that this sentence had left me with, back when I first read it. For no obvious reason, I keep imagining the line being part of a story akin to “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” — one that perhaps starts out similarly “just outside of Barstow”, but then goes in a different direction, and clearly involving the loss of the vehicle at some point in Reno. And of course the town of Barstow I associate less with Hunter S. Thompson than with Harry Partch’s musical piece of the same name, which uses eight pieces of Depression-era hitchhiker graffiti as its lyrics. These associations, guided ruthlessly by the limits of my artistic abilities, led me to the submission you see here.
by Brian — 4 April 2011 @ 22:57