Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Gill, Harry, Ian, Jenny, Lisa, Michele.
Apologies: Jan, John, Laura, Magda, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
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Matters Arising
Ian introduced a new member Lisa to the meeting, and all attendees took it in turn to introduce themselves.
Members’ Readings
Harry — read a poem After the Dance, about mynah birds descending on the ship as it lay moored in the Bay of Bengal to eat the moths and other insects swarming on the decks. But one insect the birds leave severely alone: the Common Owl Moth (Erebus Macrops) because its appearance and movements resemble the swaying head of a cobra.
Adele — wrote an agonised piece about deciding on the spur of the moment to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, recording her feeling of dismay that the vicar made no mention of the years they’d spent together. This provoked a deep discussion as attendees reported similar experiences of family ghosting.
Gill — continued her children’s tale of Tommy’s quest to pre-empt an awful doom for the planet. Tommy has been captured in the Amazon jungle by cannibals, who decided not to have him for supper but to worship him as a god. They take him back to the Great Tree, when a rite-of passage takes place in which aspirants place their foot on a certain stone lying in the path of the mole maggots dropping off the Tree to commence drilling towards the centre of the earth.
Lisa — read from her diary describing how the Covid lockdown marooned her on the Island of Sark (one of the UK Channel Islands) and how the residents contrived to accommodate her on one of the forty tenements into which the island is divided. The previous resident was a Polish citizen who had recently mysteriously disappeared. He was subsequently found to have escaped lockdown on the island using a body board, and had joined the sole repatriation flight to Poland from nearby Guernsey.
Michele — distributed copies of a rewritten cover letter to agents seeking representation for her book The Undesirables, a historical novel of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. This letter fits the target agent’s proforma, detailing the information they want to see in any submission.
Jenny — continued reading from her period novel based on the historical figure of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the heiress of a vast fortune from the Durham coalfields. Andrew Stoney, “The World’s Worst Husband”, is still smarting over the fact that pre-nuptial legal deeds have prevented him from getting his hands on the capital of the Bowes estate. To punish Mary he is keeping her locked away in her rooms with the new baby. To pass the time he suggests she writes a general confession of her misdemeanours from her teenage years to the present day. Mary complies, in the forlorn hope this might reconcile her to her violent abusive husband.
Ian — continued reading from his recently published sff novel, Anitra’s Petition.
It is the first day of the court hearing on Mars to decide Anitra’s entitlement to full human rights. Petra, the opposing counsel, has demolished Dolpou’s impassioned plea by casting doubt on Anitra’s provenance. Back in Fort Rainbow, Anitra, Dolpou and Nanoud, the Fort’s commanding officer, hold a post-mortem on the day. They decide it’s hopeless trying to rebut Petra’s arguments, and instead they must leverage the fact that groubians are honorary human beings by getting Anitra formally accepted by the whole groubian nation as the first child they have had for thousands of years. To that end Dolpou has convened the Zbor, the groubian general assembly.
The meeting closed at 1:00 PM.
Links (in accession order)…
Contact https://whitbywriters.com/contact/
La Rosa Hotel www.whitbywriters.com/venue
Ian www.whitbywriters.com/ian-clark
Anitra’s Petition https://whitbywriters.com/2026/05/07/clark-nida-anitras-petition/
Jenny https://whitbywriters.com/jenny-burns/
Mary Eleanor Bowes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bowes,_Countess_of_Strathmore_and_Kinghorne
Whitby Writers Group 