The first meeting of a re-booted writer’s group happened this past Sunday afternoon, hosted at a local bookshop whose owner is very encouraging of local writers.
Story Tellers Bookstore is at 1473 Ottawa Street in Windsor.
The instigator is Patrick, who was an active of member of the group pre-Covid.
Samantha, Marcy and I all heard the call, and responded. We agreed to meet every two weeks, and in the time in between, will each prepare something to be read and commented on by the group.
I am looking forward to the challenge/obligation. I tend to rise to the occasion when there is a hard deadline.
We will read each other’s submissions, and prepare constructive comments on each piece. When we meet again, each person will have opportunity to read their piece aloud, and also hear what the others noticed.
This kind of group critique was a small part of the last writing class I was in, Crafting a Novel, taught by the amazing Melodie Campbell. That was back in 2017. Melodie Campbell is a prolific writer of mysteries who is also a very generous mentor and teacher.
I also had a savoury taste of this process during a week at Kenyon College in 2015, when I took part in the inaugural “Beyond Walls” writing conference for clergy. More than seventy pastors, rabbis, priests and vowed religious from several countries gathered to explore ways to exercise their call and talent to write, “beyond the walls” of their faith institutions.
I made good friends at that conference, and connected with some authors who have influenced me, including Amy Frykholm, a contributing editor for the Christian Century, and Rodger Kamenetz, a poet and teacher perhaps best known for The Jew in the Lotus. Rodger was part of a delegation of Jewish scholars and rabbis invited to meet with the Dalai Lama in 1990. HIs book, and a powerful documentary resulted from that historic pilgrimage.
Before that, I’d have to think back to a summer Creative Writing course during my under-grad at Lakehead University in the early 1980’s, and a “Writing for the Religious Market” course I was part of with the wonderful Tom Mullen, at the Earlham School of Religion in 1989. (One of my classmates was the best-selling author Philip Gulley. Phil writes theology, but before he did that, he gained fame with a series of novels about life centred around a Quaker congregation in small town rural Indiana. The books and Phil are kindhearted, insightful, and very funny. If they had a murder or two in them, they’d be perfect.)