Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Ian, Jan, Jenny, Laura, Michele, Tim.
Apologies: Gill, Harry, John, Magda, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
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Matters Arising
Ian reported an event to take place at our venue, La Rosa Hotel on Friday 2 October at 7pm: a talk by the local author Lauren Moss entitled Wicked Roots: forgotten folklore and ancient myths of familiar plants. The event will be blogged on this website over the next few days.
Jenny reported an event to take place in St Ninian’s Church, Baxtergate on Tuesday 6 October at 7pm: An Evening Of Whitby Memories – a slide show of Whitby’s past on the Big Screen. Admission free, but donations welcome. There will be a raffle, and refreshments will be on-sale. This event too will be blogged on this website over the next few days.
Members’ Readings
Michele — has been invited to a “pitch party” to present her book The Undesirables. She handed out copied of her draft pitch for comments and advice. Several comments were offered.
Jan — has just spent a week with Alice, who with her husband and two toddlers lived off-grid in a tiny French village near La Rochelle in 2012 or thereabouts. Jan continued reading from her co-authored draft of Alice’s story.
She describes how on her walks around her village, Alice’s usual accessory was a wheelbarrow. Various village characters were described, especially the weird ones, mostly newcomers. One strange old lady of 90 turned out to be descended from ancient French nobility.
Alice as challenged on whether her lifestyle wasn’t perhaps disadvantaging her children. She defended her family stoutly, declaring that her children were freespirits who could well hold their own among the scions of the middle classes. She was then told “the next generation of freespirits need their tumble-drying done.”
Laura — has come across something she found truly shocking. Four children in China (one the child of a local bigwig) tortured a mother bitch and her pups to death in an egregiously cruel way. The details (which we won’t reproduce here) found their way onto the internet where they aroused widespread international indignation. The Chinese authorities appear to have taken no action against the children.
Laura’s piece prompted an impassioned discussion by the group. Some sought to prioritise the incident by comparison with atrocities committed against people in China, not to mention in Russia – and the USA.
Tim — continued with his satirical narrative poem about the “Wire people” – anodised steel wire statues of famous local heroes, notably William Scoresby Junior, inventor of the Crows Nest; and Henry Freeman, sole survivor of a foundered lifeboat, the most junior crew member and the only one to be wearing the new cork lifebelt.
Ian — drew the attention of the group to the fact that the six so-called legal deposit libraries are entitled by law to free copies of all printed matter published in the UK. Was anyone in the group who had self-published a book aware of this legal obligation? It appeared not.
The meeting closed at 1:10 PM.
Links (in accession order)…
Contact https://whitbywriters.com/contact/
La Rosa Hotel www.whitbywriters.com/venue
