Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Harry, Ian, Jan, Laura, Magda, Michele, Pip.
Apologies: Adele, Gill, Jenny, John, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
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Matters Arising
Magda asked if more time in a slot could be allocated to discussion than the current nominal 2 minutes, it being one of the most valuable parts of a meeting. Both Harry and Ian expressed agreement. The meeting consensus was for approximately 1/3 of the slot time for discussion. Ian adjusted his pair of timers accordingly.
Members’ Readings
Jan — is co-authoring the memoir of a friend called Alice (unable to write for herself), who with her husband and two toddlers lived off-grid in a tiny French village near La Rochelle in 2012 or thereabouts.
Neighbour Aristide has his eye on Alice’s unwanted barrowload of fruit for his pigs. Alice has reservations: the fruit is beginning to ferment and might upset the animals. Aristide nevertheless goes ahead and uses the fruit for swill. Sure enough, there is sufficient alcohol in it to intoxicate the pigs, which break loose and rampage through the village – a tale told and retold for a decade.
An opinionated girlfriend of a family visitor (a recent graduate in the social sciences) expressed the view that the children, lacking smartphones, TV and social media, risked growing up socially deprived. This caused Alice some heart-searching. The two children spent most of the day running free with little or nothing on, going to bed and sleeping like tops. But Alice (herself growing up off-grid in a Winnebago in North California) has difficulty telling the time, plus some other common skills among conventionally brought-up children. She has an encounter with the Mayor, who clearly wonders if the family are a credit to the village.
Harry — distributed copies and read another instalment of One Last Swing of the Lamp, his memoir of serving in the Merchant Navy as radio officer. We have reached Chapter 7: Sandheads.
The SS Marwarri has reached the Bay of Bengal, and Harry is in radio contact with the pilot. They have arrived during a Calcutta dock strike: communist agitation stirred up by Moscow, and join 32 other cargo vessels at anchor, waiting for the strike to end.
A massive cyclone arrives, making conditions even more hellish. Awnings rigged across the deck catch rainwater during a cloudburst, otherwise water is rationed, but the ship is well-stocked with Tennants lager so the crew are at no risk of going thirsty.
Harry passed around a marvellous publication: a sort of chart in book form, in a style reminiscent (to a landlubber) of manuals of long-distance walks in the Yorkshire Dales: the HMSO (1940) edition of the Bay Of Bengal Pilot.
Magda — moves on from her exploration of the issues surrounding dowsing and its public acceptance, or toleration, to an exploration of Animism and pagan beliefs regarding (say) scrying with a pendulum. Her approach is journalistic rather than advocatory. She offered some interesting turns-of-phrase, such as Nature being “minded”, and the adoption of an animistic outlook as “re-wilding the Soul”. She reviewed the historical perspective of animism: the Greeks laying stress on inner feelings aroused by a sense of place, whereas the Romans focused on what they could see with their eyes: the flight of birds, or the shapes of entrails of sacrificed animals.
Michele — distributed copies of a draft cover letter to agents seeking representation for her book The Undesirables, a historical novel of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. She has concluded that her novel will be primarily of interest in her home country of South Africa – and once published there, to USA readers of SA extraction. Ian reluctantly agreed, although he felt that the UK needed to hear the dreadful story she tells about the concentration camps for non-combatants: mostly women and children.
The meeting offered a detailed critique of her letter, while broadly agreeing that it was basically sound and compelling. Typical criticism focused on avoiding trigger words like feministic in favour of (e.g.) woman-centred, and for more stress on the black experience, which the novel sympathetically presents almost as strongly as its natural focus on the central character, the Boer girl Anna.
The meeting closed at 1:10 PM.
Links (in accession order)…
Contact https://whitbywriters.com/contact/
La Rosa Hotel www.whitbywriters.com/venue
Whitby Writers Group 