Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Gill, Harry, Ian, Jan, Magda, Tim.
Apologies: Adele, Jenny, John, Laura, Michele, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
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Matters Arising
Ian reported that Tim was reciting his Wirefolk poem at Flowergate Hall during Whitby Lit Fest.
Ian also reported that Anitra’s Petition was now into its Second Edition, the 100 numbered copies of the First Edition now being out-of-stock.
Members’ Readings
Jan — is writing a trilogy about the Spanish Civil War, from the perspective of the Irish volunteers on both sides. She has finished the first book and is now writing Book 2, about Father Michael Riley, who initially wanted to fight on the side of persecuted Catholic clergy, but when he saw the realities on the ground he wanted to change sides.
Gill — read from an adult novel she is now writing, a ghost story told in the first person by someone who has died, but remains conscious, and can talk with visitors to her grave, or to other residents of the graveyard.
Tim — continued with his narrative poem about the Wire Folk, a series of steel wire statues of famous local heroes gracing the streets of Whitby, whom he imagines coming to life during the night and having adventures. Thus the statue of the pioneer photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe goes off taking naughty pictures of the Herring Girls, and Henry Freeman gets presented with a knitted gansy by a besotted admirer. Tim read chapters 9: A Cask of Rum; 10: Dawn; 11: The Herring Girls; and 12: The Humans Come Alive.
Harry — distributed copies of and read out Chapter 10 of his memoir of life at sea in the 1960s as First Radio Officer on the SS Marwarri. His tale is replete with recollections of the music and current affairs of the time. It is 1961, and the officers disembark at Kidderpore, Bengal, to be beset by jostling beggar children with piteous disabilities. An order to the imposing Sikh taxi driver: “Scheherazade’s, juldi jaiga (go fast)” is met by the rejoinder, “And to Scheherazade’s we shall go, good sir, but at a speed that is legal in West Bengal.”
Magda — read her reminiscence, in impressive belles-lettres, of reaching a milestone in her age, starkly aware of the difference between biological age and mental age.
Ian — reprised the first section of his short story A Hand In the Dark. In Weardale’s Rocky Glen an eleven-year-old boy gets rescued from the clutches of a marauding paedophile by an elfin slip of a girl armed with bow and arrow.
The meeting closed at 1:10 PM.
Links (in accession order)…
Contact https://whitbywriters.com/contact/
La Rosa Hotel www.whitbywriters.com/venue
Ian www.whitbywriters.com/ian-clark
A Hand In the Dark https://whitbywriters.com/2025/04/11/a-hand-in-the-dark/
Anitra’s Petition https://whitbywriters.com/2026/05/07/clark-nida-anitras-petition/
Freedom From Torture https://www.freedomfromtorture.org
Harry www.whitbywriters.com/harry-nicholson
Adele https://whitbywriters.com/adele-duffield/
Whitby Lit Fest https://whitbywriters.com/2026/08/16/whitby-lit-fest-returns/
