February 2022 Meeting 2

Double Rainbow over Bridgnorth - Sunday 6th February 2022

Hightown Writers’ Workshop Meeting

Tuesday 22^nd  February 2022 at 7.30pm in Peepo’s Spirit Room.

Present Liz, Jennie, Sue, John & Martin plus contributions from Adam

Apologies Marie, Kath, Andy and Adam

This meeting heard members’ responses to the current writing theme, 'Over Again'.

There was a wonderful relaxed musical element to our February meeting which began with John Pedrick’s ‘Pebble Song’ which transported us to love against a background of the sea shore, storms and the tides coming and going.

Jenny followed with a reading of her story ‘Over and Over Again’ set on the stormy eve of March 21^st, a date which always sends her protagonist, Annie, back to her troubled childhood in the North East, remembering the love of her mother, Rita – whose birthday fell on March 21^st – and the disturbing behaviour of her father, Ken. After her mother’s death Ken comes to live with Annie and reveals how he was mistreated as a child. Annie decides to write a novel, ‘Dark Days’, about inappropriate father-daughter relationships happening over and over again since the dawn of time.

Sue described her experience of the Great Storm of 1987 when her Southend classroom was wrecked and strewn with shards of smashed glass and she reflected on how such storms; most recently Dudley, Eunice and Franklin are becoming the twenty-first century norm.

Adam sent in a poem, ‘Over the Forest of Bowland Once Again’ which Liz read aloud. We admired how he enables us to see the landscapes he knows so well through his eyes and John reflected on how this poem captured an area he knew so well from his time working on the railways.

Martin brought the meeting to a close with two songs on the ‘Over Again’ theme. The first ‘Sixties Child’ took some of us older ones back in time and the second was R&B inspired to go with ‘sitting in a bar’ over and again as we have all done in our lives.

The meeting finished at 9pm

A BIG thank you to both John and Martin for bringing along their guitars and making the evening magical.

The next meeting is on 22^nd March in Peepo’s Spirit Room at 7.30 until later than 9pm (hopefully!):

1.    Jennie agreed to chair the March meeting.

2.    The next writing theme will be “Choose any book. Turn to Chapter 5. Read the 5^th line of the 5^th page of Chapter 5 and use that line as your writing prompt in any genre.”