Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Harry, Ian, Jenny, John, Kaz, Michele, Suzanne.
Apologies: Gill, Jan, Jonathan, Laura, Magda, Pip.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Adele reminded us that the next meeting on 27 February would be a play-reading in collaboration with Dogwood Theatre Productions. Details will follow in the reminder sent out the day before.
Kaz announced a Gig in aid of Alzheimers at the Rifle Club on 14 March at 7.45 pm. Fastkatz, and others.
Members’ Readings
Adele — read a frank article: Ladies Wot Lunch.
Her group of menopausal ladies meets to share hope, fears and anxieties. Does He Still Love Me?
Pills, HRT; lubricants; periods; twisted fallopian tubes; unbalanced emotions; jealousy of youngsters; being an earth-mother. The best remedy they’ve found for all of these things is chat.
Kaz — read a poem from her stage production in-progress about the lives of deprived people. One of the characters is Blake, who talks in rhyming couplets. He bewails his lack of luck and resources in a doleful monologue.
Suzanne — read a short memoir: Tache-positive, of her life as a dentist’s trainee assistant, in the aggressively homophobic world of the mid-80s. Dentists suit-up in biohazard gear before treating patients with HIV, if they agree to treat them at all. Her dentist boss makes snide comments about a young patient’s thin ‘tache, which classifies him according to contemporary fashion as a gay man.
Ian — read the first half of his short story: Face 48, first published in VOLCHIN & Other Stories. It was written ca. 1985 and Ian hopes to update it for the modern world of generative AI.
A daring postgraduate project in Applied Psychology has surviving Marian visionaries selecting from 100 randomly-generated computer images of young Jewish girls. The outcome of the experiment takes physical form to invade the life of the narrator, now graduated and employed as a social worker.
Michele — read a further instalment of her novel in-progress: The Undesirables, set in Southern Africa during the Boer War of 1898-1902.
The war may be over but much bitterness remains. Anna, now a nurse, has received a letter from her father approving of her engagement to the young Scottish Doctor Finn whom she has met in Camp Irene. Everything sounds cosy, but they have reckoned without Anna’s brother Nils, who is on his way back home from the POW camp on St Helena.
Harry — continued reading his 1960s seafaring memoir, Sea Wife, handing out copies to read along.
It is August, 1960. The Marwarri, bound for Trincomalee to top up her cargo with the finest Ceylon tea before heading out across the Atlantic to the USA, is beset by a storm in the Bay of Bengal. There is disaster on land and considerable danger to the ship of breaking her back at her mooring.
They make it safely to Trincomalee, and take on board the cargo of tea. Beryl learns how to make curry from the Goanese cook, but doubts she’ll find the spices locally back home in Hartlepool.
Jenny — continued reading from her period novel in-progress based on the historical figure of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the heiress of a vast fortune from the Durham coalfields.
Mary is back from London at her beautiful estate of Gibside, with the accommodating Mr Gray. Soon falling pregnant, she pleads with Mr Gray once again to acquire the medicine to procure an abortion. But this time she finds she must agree to a betrothal in order to secure her lover’s cooperation.
John — read a short story entertainingly told in the first person by the pensioner daughter of a famous architect. Hoping to improve her social life (not to say her sex life) by signing up for a U3A course, she suffers a series of disappointments, until she gets the idea of starting her own course: Architecture III.
The meeting closed at 1:10 PM
Whitby Writers Group 