January 2025 Meeting

Minutes of Quarterly Meeting Saturday 11^th January 2025

2 – 5pm in Bridgnorth Library Meeting Room, Listley Street

Present: Michele, Irena, Toli, Andy, Emma, Ann, John, Ruth, Adam, Kath, Marie, Sue, Jennie, Liz (chair)

Apologies: Suzie, Fiona, Esme, Stuart

We welcomed 14 people to our first quarterly meeting half of whom were members who have been finding it difficult to attend regular meetings held on the fourth Tuesday evening of every month. We were especially happy to welcome Toli from Bridgnorth Writers to our workshop.

It cost £42 to hire the room but shared between us that worked out as £3/head.  We decided to continue with the experimental 2025 quarterly meetings. The next one will be Saturday 12^th April. The summer meeting will be Saturday 12^th July and the autumn meeting Saturday 13^th October. Please note the dates in your diaries. We noted that the dates will not suit everyone but hope that at least 10 – 14 or more people will be able to attend.

Nineteen people (members and some partners) have signed up for our delayed 2024 annual meal which will be at Peepo’s on Tuesday 28^th January. It will be instead of our usual monthly meeting. Liz will confirm the booking and Jennie will organise menu choices if Peepo’s so wish. Let Liz, Jennie or Peepo’s know if you want to attend the meal but have not yet signed up.

As there will be no more workshop meetings this January, the February writing task was shared with members. It is:

‘Choose any book. Turn to Chapter 5. Open the 5th page of Ch5 and count down to the 5th line. Use that line/sentence as your writing prompt.’

The next full workshop meeting will be on Tuesday 25^th February, at 7pm in Peepo’s Spirit Room. John A-S will be chairing.

We had some discussion about how best to respond to members' writing. Ann urged people to leave short comments about the writing which is shared on the blog and Ruth (and others) urged those of us who want a more in-depth commentary on their writing to circulate a passage of their work before meetings so that people can share their thoughts privately and perhaps mark-up comments on the ‘Word’ document. We agreed to send an email to regular attendees which is not BCC’d so that members can communicate directly by email without going through the ‘hightownwriters@gmail’ email hub. Liz will facilitate that with the minutes of this meeting.

We began our writing workshop with a review of many of the forms of writing preferred by our members. Poetry and Fiction emerged as the most used forms and there was some discussion about poetry sparked by Marie – if it doesn’t rhyme it doesn’t sound like a poem – Marie later inadvertently wrote a poem which didn’t rhyme without realising it! Michelle reminded us of the poetry which characterises the liturgy of religious texts. Some of us, Emma, Toli, Ann and others are writing novels whilst others prefer the short story form. We had some discussion about what constitutes ‘flash fiction’ – would that include our monthly writing task with a 1,000 word limit? When we talked about the non-fiction (mainly scientific, travel and diary writing) members share, Emma introduced the discipline of ‘creative non-fiction’ which was new to most of us. We hope she might lead the autumn October quarterly workshop on this topic. Drama and Screenwriting are not often tackled by our members but newer members were very interested in reviving the performance of Jennie, Kay and Val’s dramatization of ‘The House in Dormer Forest’ which just before Covid was rehearsed to specially written music but not performed.

We moved on to discuss our current writing theme ‘LIGHT’. Each person contributed very different thoughts on the topic ranging from the scientific and astronomical to the emotional and sacred noting the imagery of light in every culture in so many contexts, including logos such as that of Amnesty International. We then moved on to our first warm up writing exercise, an old favourite, the word maze. But we tried to include light references and light imagery in our writing. Our word maze word choices were – explosion – bright - snow – blank - Gaza - time-travel - tree -   tricycle – birthday – cups - horse – dog – green - daffodil. We wrote for twenty minutes and then stopped for tea, coffee and biscuits. Some of the results of this warmup exercise will be shared on the blog over the next few weeks. As usual they were very varied and quite brilliant.

After reading our warm-up writing we moved on to opening one of Liz’s Christmas presents – a bottle of ‘Writer’s Block’ tablets from the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle. Inside each tablet we discovered quotations from various famous writers and poets, which we read aloud and wrote short poetic responses to – some in the form of haiku. Hopefully some of those responses will be developed and shared on the blog. By then the time was 16.45, it was dark, and with the freezing fog closing in outside members felt like making a move home. Sadly, we decided to postpone reading and responding to writing which people had brought along, to until the next proper workshop meeting in February.

We washed up, locked up and look forward to 2025 and another year of writing.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!