The wait is over for the versifiers and fans of the three-year-old Bainbridge Island Limerick Contest. The anthology From Bad to Verse: Celebrating Three Years of Bainbridge Island Limericks is finally off the presses.
From Bad to Verse weighs in at 104 pages and, in addition to winners, honorable mentions, and editors’ choice selections from the contest’s first three years starting in 2008, there are illustrations and prefatory notes for all three contests.
The idea for a limerick competition around Bainbridge places grew from a pipe dream of staff members Ann Combs and John Willson during their dark hours closing Monday nights at the store.The project took on a life of its own, and in the first three years, we’ve received over 250 submissions from an enthusiastic community.
To physically bring the book into the world, we dipped into the new technology available to the book industry for print-on-demand books, availing ourselves of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) belonging to our estimable colleagues at Village Books, a Bellingham indie bookstore celebrating 30 years in business. The EBM can have a 200+ page paperback printed, bound, and ready for sale in minutes. We hope to use this marvel of the book world in support of other worthy local publishing projects.
Proceeds from the sale of the book benefit Stephens House and the Bainbridge Island Special Needs Foundation.
Of the bounty of wonderful verse this year, several efforts by John Morrow received Honorable Mentions. We got an extra chuckle from his second Chilly Hilly-themed poem on page 87, and feel that this piece is pointing the contest in encouraging new directions.
Here is the winning limerick from this year’s competition, penned by Al Gunby:
A young man once sailed Agate Pass~~~~~
Along with his favorite lass;
In a clinch, he misjudged
and the bridge wouldn’t budge,
So his boat joined the cod and the bass.
We thank all those who shared their work!
