Inspiration is an open oor

Originally published in Curiosity Never Killed the Writer on March 6, 2018.

Inspiration is like the first fragrant wisp of a flower in spring, a burst of fireworks against a night sky, a fleeting familiar musical note that brings you back to your youth. It seizes all your senses.

It can hit you out of the proverbial blue and in seemingly ordinary places.

A co-worker told me a story recently about how Frank Baum came up with the name Oz in his classic children’s story, The Wizard of Oz. We were talking about the good old days in print, when people read newspapers and books in paper format, and he said that Baum was looking at the spine of a dictionary that covered the words from O to Z when he came up with his famous name.

Turns out his story was a variation on what appears to be the fantastical and mythical truth.

Most people, including the folks at Snopes, seem to agree that the name came into Baum’s head one day while reading a story to neighbourhood children. He was telling them about some characters who travel to an imaginary world to meet a great wizard. When asked about the name of the land Baum looked around his study to a file cabinet with two labels, A-N and O-Z, and said Oz.

True or false, I can understand how a seemingly random act can be the spark of something creative, maybe even ingenious. Inspiration can open your mind and imagination in the unlikeliest of places and times.

Like a sign on a bus.

On one Transit Windsor bus one morning, I noticed that someone erased the “d” in door in the instructional sign to passengers: “Press bar to open oor.”

Oor? I thought.

Hmmm.

How to put that to good use.

Perhaps, Oor can become my own magical land in a story I will write. Like Baum’s Oz and Og, by Canada’s beloved Pierre Berton. Or maybe Oor can become a memorable character in a tale that will also become a classic, 100 years from now?

A cyber-search through the oors of the Internet takes me on my own adventure.

I found Oor is the oldest currently published music magazine in the Netherlands. Urban Dictionary says it’s an acronym for Out of Respect. Merriam-Webster says oor is a Scottish variety of our.

Indeed, Scottish poet Kathleen Craig uses the expression in her poem “Ghostie.”

Wiktionary offers a boatland of oors used in other tongues.

There was even a comic book character, Oor Wullie, whose likeness can be found in the National Museum of Scotland.

All good stuff and perhaps fodder for my character/book of Oor. But before I sit down to write, I start another Internet search for “Oor book” and discover that, like the Bible says, there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

Someone beat me on the way to the publisher’s office with his own book of Oor.

James Barclay, a Scottish author, set his crudely titled Oor Hoose in a Glasgow tenement which faced demolition. “All the residents, apart from the McPhatters, have vacated the building but this pair are determined that they’ll not move,” according to the description on Amazon’s UK site.

And so, just like that, the puff of inspiration disperses and blows away into the wind, leaving me down below looking up at a blank sky.

I hope my next bus ride gives me something inspirational and unique.