July 2024 Meeting

Minutes of High Town Writers Workshop

7pm, Tuesday 23^rd July 2024 in The Spirit Room of Peepo’s

Present: Liz (Chair), Sue, Jennie, John A-S, Andy, Kath, Heather, Ruth, Suzie, Esme, Ann, Adam, Irena

Apologies: Fiona, Martin, Emma, Alex P., Marie, Stuart

We congratulated our founder member, Julia, on her success, winning Shrewsbury for Labour in the recent General Election and wish her well. We signed a card of congratulations for her too.

We discussed whether minutes of past meetings needed to be amended and decided it was not necessary. It was reaffirmed that contributions to the blog are posted ‘as received’. Only the most obvious of spelling mistakes or formatting will be corrected. Punctuation will stand as sent in.

People who want to share their writing on the blog can send it to hightownwriters@gmail.com or post it directly. There will be further guidance in the autumn about how to post to the blog.

 

1.        The next meeting of HTW is, ‘Do the Write Thing’ which is part of the Bridgnorth Arts and Music Festival. It will take place in the library meeting room (side entrance) at 5pm on Thursday 22^nd August. Irena will lead the workshop.

2.        The main August meeting is Tuesday 27^th August, from 7pm at Peepo’s. Ann will chair. Suzie will publicise the meeting on FB. Writing theme: anything with a link to ‘Summer’

 and / or

An additional/optional idea for locally inspired writing could be to revisit our 2022 imaginings of life in and around the Cartway pubs. Several of pieces of writing inspired by this task feature in our 10^th anniversary book, ‘Write On’ – and there is wide scope for much more writing! See the task under 2022 September:

High Town Writers' Workshop: Themes

3.        Our last 10^th Anniversary Celebration will be a ‘Late-Summer Garden Party’ from 3pm on Sunday 1^st September in Jennie’s back garden. Bring food and drink. Vegetarian dishes preferred.

4.        The September 2024 meeting will be on Tuesday 24^th September – Jennie will chair.

Irena had collated and shared new ideas that had been floated at the June meeting about overcoming writer's block and the meeting continued with an 'overcoming writer’s block’ task:15 minutes writing, in any style, which began to explore ideas about the next writing theme, 'summer':

‘You and ‘another’ have taken a summer break to an unknown city. You had been deep in conversation when you suddenly realise they’ve disappeared; you’re talking to thin air! What happens next?

The meeting continued with sharing our July writing on the theme of ‘water’ much of which can be revisited over the next few weeks on our blog High Town Writers' Workshop. Between us we managed to cover a wide range of states of water from letting off steam to glacial melting in a wide range of writing styles, poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, first narrators, soliloquies and much more. We read the poems from members who couldn’t make tonight’s meeting but who had sent in verse for sharing.

The meeting ended at 9.50pm