June 2021 Meeting

 

Wednesday 9^th June 2021 – 7.45pm

 

Present: Jennie, Liz and Martin (in Jennie’s garden) and Kay (via Zoom)

Apologies: Kath, Andy, Sue and Marie

 

It was a delight to meet up with Martin for the first time after so many months of getting to know him on-line. Welcome to our merry band of writers!!🤗  We told him a bit about ourselves and our 2014 origins and then subjected him to our ‘go-to’ warm up activity of  a word maze on the theme of summer. Our words were: shimmer, rainbow, insects, cloudless, hedge, heat-haze, songbirds, sunburst. Beautiful pieces evocative of our lovely countryside in June (Martin’s ‘happy month’) were written by Martin who focussed on his lifetime of daily walking beloved collie dogs; Kay who drew upon her new environment: walking Offa’s Dyke, the River Teme in the early morning haze and the characters she meets like an elderly lady who speaks to the hedgerows, and Jennie whose poetic description traced the theme of a summer’s day being like a sunburst. Liz wrote about a heatwave she remembered whilst visiting Washington Cathedral one hot August afternoon in 1973.

 

June’s writing theme was ‘Coincidence’. 

Martin shared chapters of his novel in progress when one character surprises another by finishing off a poem which the reciter thought was utterly unique to The Chronicles of an East Coast Mariner – a book he though he only had possession of – but it turns out another leather bound volume was in the possession of the other character’s aunt.  The two characters also discover the coincidence of one intending to run for political office, unknowing that the other character’s brother-in-law had died whilst aspiring to that self same office.

Kay shared the sequence of events she had uncovered whilst researching her mother’s genealogy which surprisingly led back to Shropshire – a place Kay had never even visited until she coincidentally moved here in 1995.

Jenny’s story of 12 year old Harry’s discovery of an cygnet abandoned by a bullying cobb swan prompted him to turn to his friend's father for help as his own bullying, scary father had walked out on the family. Barry the friend's father, also a single parent, ran a wildlife rescue trust, rescued the cygnet and upon taking Harry home discovered by a happy coincidence that he and Harry's mum had gone to school together. They arrange to meet again.

 

The next meeting will be at our 7.30pm on TUESDAY 27^th July 2021 (It was felt that we should stick to our previous schedule – the fourth Tuesday of each month – rather than juggle meetings to accommodate other commitments which had resulted in so few people being able to attend June’s meeting)

 

July’s writing theme (thank you Martin!!) is Murder Mystery