Archive for January 2011

We like it when new people turn up, and tonight we had three newbies who were all brave enough to read out on their first visit, promising some interesting prose and poems for the future.

Plus a visit from Carol, who if memory serves, first came to wgwg about sixteen years ago. Her work just gets better and better, in fact one of our number wanted to take the short story she read out last night home with her to read again, yes it was that good!

"Have you got what it takes to be the next Steig Larsson or Henning Mankell? If so there's a place on a Birkbeck College creative writing course up for grabs when you take part in the Brent Libraries short story competition. Swedish crime fiction author Camilla Ceder has written the opening lines. ... All you have to do is complete the story in no more than 2,000 words."

If you are interested go to click Brent Libraries short story competition for full details.

On 19th January at the College of NW London in Willesden at 7pm there is a meeting about the fact the council want to knock down Willesden Green Library Centre in order to re-build it as a complex with space for social housing. The new complex is due to re-open in 2014. I don't know when the library is due to close but I'm guessing it must be fairly soon.

There are lots of questions to be answered, amongst them, why are they knocking down a building that received a £336500 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund as recently as 2006 in order to incorporate the Brent Museum into the building? They say they will replace the present library and incorporate it in the new building, but they said that about my local library in a new complex they have just opened in Northolt - and the 'new library' consists of about five bookcases of 'bestsellers' and virtually no non-fiction and one shelf of reference books - yes it's a library - but only just.

Where the wgwg will meet if/when the library is knocked down is something that we will need to think about - I am sure we will find somewhere but I also think we need to ask the council some questions about this decision to knock down a building that has has so much spent on it so recently!

Happy New Year to one and all.
Last night wgwg got back into the writing habit after all the Christmas and New Year madness with two excellent stories from Mary and Bilal. We then repaired to the pub to celebrate Bilal's birthday with a nice cup of tea - honest!