Archive for February 2012

Well I must admit that initially the signs weren't looking good for tonight - illness and family commitments had cut a swathe through our ranks, or so it seemed. I sat in the room not expecting anyone to turn up...then five people arrived and we had a functioning group, phew. We critiqued a children's story, a poem and a short story and then repaired to the pub to talk about punctuation, bad writing, good writing, ghosts and Kindles. Alistair sported a very striking hat because it was his birthday and because you weren't there, you missed the opportunity to see Alistair's hat - it's too late now, he is off to South Africa for a while, we will miss him. We also have a new member - not the new member from last week, but a new new member, we hope she comes back, we liked her and we liked her writing - fingers crossed...

I HATE Italo Calvino.

Anyway, it's cold... it's colder than a politician's heart, it's so cold that the local flasher was caught describing himself to women, it was so cold the lawyers had their hands in their own pockets... etc, etc...

We were not expecting many people but five hardy souls turned up, including a new poet. The poet had spoken about how he had tried various other writers' groups, so when he read out, instead of being really nice and positive as even the most acid-tongued of are when a new person reads out for the first time, we had to make sure that our feedback was more insightful that whatever he had from other groups - so we gave it to him. We hope he comes back!

So there was poetry from the new member and only one other piece of prose, but we read, listened and vivisected til 9.20pm.

After the pub, this happened: