Hightown Writer’s Workshop Meeting Minutes
Tuesday 23rd August 2022 at 7.30pm in the Spirit
Room at Peepo
Present: John A-S, Stuart, Adam, Liz, Alex and Jennie
Apologies: Sue.
Marie, Jayne, Tanya, Kath, Kay, Martin
Chair: Liz
We began with a warm welcome to a new member John A-S, who
has joined us as a newcomer to Shropshire by way of Lincolnshire. Welcome John!
John had already discovered our blogspot – and was very complimentary. We hope he will dust off some of the writing he has been doing all his life and soon join members who contribute and are published on the blog.
hightownwriters.blogspot.com
We started with the ‘workshop’ element of our meeting and used five ‘story cubes’ to generate ideas for a warm up exercise. The dice fell – all over the place – but were retrieved and found to have fallen on ‘eye’, ‘arrow’, ‘snowflake’, ‘sad/worried face’ and a ‘sheep’. As always our Hightown Writers came up with different and original ideas. Stuart and Adam wrote atmospheric descriptions drawn from our beautiful countryside, Jennie wrote about sadness felt about seeing a sheep carcass being transported to the butchers followed by seeing a flock of sheep sheltering from the elements on a snowy winters day, John brought a touch of history to the task with his take on King Harold being felled by an arrow in his eye and his dying resentment that the town which would grow on site of his death would become known as Battle, not Harald’s Town and Liz wrote about a hill farmer finding his way through the BBC to the Farming Today studio where he intended to confront a government minister about the lack of support for sheep farmers and their communities now that European subsidies have ended.
After Alex arrived we discussed future meetings and decided to go ahead with the afternoon meeting on Sunday 11th September in Jennie’s back garden in East Castle Street. We will aim to make these a regular event and Stuart offered to host the next weekend meeting in his house. IF this becomes a quarterly event that could be our Christmas gathering! Time flies. Hightown Writers has always been an informal group and we discussed Alex’s idea of additional meetings during the month – more meeting up for a drink and a chat about writing. We left it that anyone wanting to meet other HTW members at times apart from the 4th Tuesday of each month, should email HTW, or post on FB, with the the who, when and where and then see who turns up. Hightown Writers also shares chairing and minute taking amongst the members. Alex also suggested setting up a HTW ‘WhatsApp’ group – which is a gap in our digital profile!
Alex volunteered to chair the next meeting on Tuesday 27th
September at 7.30, Peepo’s Spirit Bar.
The September writing task is locally inspired:
There used to be 22 pubs on the Cartway; the main link
between High Town and the Quayside in the days when Bridgnorth was an important
port on the River Severn. They served the needs of the traders, sailors and
river folk.
Write a story or poem inspired by one or more of their names:
The Red Lion
The Kouli Khan
The Woolpack
The Beehive
The White Hart
The Ship and Anchor
The Coopers Arm
The Saltbox
The Forge and Hammer
The Tumbling Sailors
The Star
The Mermaid
The Britannia
The Severn Trow
The Compasses
The Bush
The Railway Tavern
The Saltbox
The Cornucopia (or Horn of Plenty)
The Horn and Trumpet (later The French Horn)
The Magpie (now Bassa Villa)
The Black Boy (or The Blackie Boy – the last of the 22 pubs to survive
Alex and John have been reading through our blogspot and have begun to think of which pieces they would like to see in an anthology. Alex said, Paul’s James Bond story ‘definitely’ and one/some of Jennie’s poems. At this point Jennie remembered she had written a limerick about Alex which she shared, accompanied by laughter, with the group.
We continued the meeting with reading our August writing on
the theme of Summer.
Jayne sent in her childhood memories which will be our first piece
of ‘Summer’ writing to appear on the blogspot during September beginning on the
Thursday 1st September.
Alex was the first to share a poem he had written in rhyming
couplets describing the very modern sights of a twenty first century summer.
Stuart wrote about the frisson of anticipation that came in
the still before a summer storm broke drenching Uedica and her friend Rhiannon
who took shelter under willows by the water where they had cooled off after a
long walk through hot, harvested corn fields. They made it home where they
dried their clothes in the rafters and lay down to listen to the rain and watch
it through an open door. Stuart taught us all a new word, ‘petrichor’ which
the Met Office says, “is the smell of rain. The word comes from the Greek
words 'petra', meaning stone, and 'ichor', which in Greek mythology refers to
the golden fluid that flows in the veins of the immortals.” Liz said how
much Stuart’s description reminded her when the rains break the tropical heat
of Lagos where she used to live. Very atmospheric.
Adam wrote a beautifully descriptive poem of a hot summer’s
day in Bourton-on-the-Water.
Liz combined her love of John Clare’s sonnet, perfectly describing
a summer’s day, with a classroom story and sonnet describing tropical life and school
pupils who had to study foreign writing set in an unknown climate.
John had bravely brought along a piece of observational
writing he’d penned in ‘The School House’, a Lincolnshire coffee shop, whilst
waiting to collect his wife from an ‘aqua-size’ class. He had enjoyed being
amongst the mostly young, female customers and staff around him whilst noting
that the few male customers were either loud mouthed or ‘teflon-skinned almost-customers’
(We loved that phrase!) who sat around for an hour or so typing on their laptops
on the back of buying just one coffee. Feeling the cap fitting, John indulged
himself by ordering his second breakfast of the day! We discussed the virtues
of describing life and the characters surrounding us whilst we, as writers,
watch and describe humanity’s foibles.
Jennie rounded off the evening’s readings with an edited first part of her Yorkshire tale of Fred Elwell and how his paintings brought together two long separated friends who had been at school together in Beverley Grammar School. The story (see 4 July blog) traced the fascinating tale of the Elwell name and was set against the background of Yorkshire’s rich archaeological history. Jennie has written part two which develops the relationship between Jo and Sonya which we look forward to hearing/reading soon!
The meeting ended with a plea to send any pieces of writing you want published on the blog spot to hightownwriters@gmail.com
We finished our meeting at 10pm.
Please send any corrections to the above minutes to hightownwriters@gmail.com
Hightown Writers Workshop – next workshop meeting
Tuesday 27th September 2022
At 7.30pm
The Spirit Room, Peepo’s Italian Restaurant,
Chair: Alex
Writing Theme: Writing inspired by one of the old pub names
that used to line Bridgnorth’s Cartway – see list above.
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