Coming to you early this week, because when you’re cottaging, you’ve got to take your wifi where you can get it…
So here’s a cool and somewhat unexpected perk of spending the summer at a cottage far away from your usual home: you get to meet so many interesting new people – like the lovely group of women I met last Wednesday at the Georgian Bay Memoirs Writing Club.
These fantastic women are all at different stages of their writing/publishing journey – some have a traditionally printed book, others have binders of material they’re organizing to publish but all of them are writing, writing, writing.
And even more wonderfully, they are sharing their writing and supporting each other.
Not all writer’s groups are like this – I’ve attended a few groups where the jealousy of other people’s work was palpable and it’s not fun or instructive or actually healthy to attend one of those.
But the GBMWC – they know how to do it. Gail, the group’s leader, sends out prompts every week to spark everybody’s creativity and then they get together to have coffee <and really delicious gluten free snacks!> and read their stuff to each other.
The week I attended, a few people shared some things they’d been working on and it was marvellous.
Gail read a wonderful piece about radios, starting with a fascinating memory her mom had told her about the very first time she’d ever heard a radio as a little girl and what a magical thing that was, right up to Gail’s own teenage years of listening to Connie Francis and Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly on her own small radio while getting ready for a date. Gail’s writing had a lovely familiar tone to it, like she was just telling you a story at the kitchen table.
Sue wrote a lovely reflection about meeting her husband and their dating years and she made it sound so romantic and lovely and a little touched by fate – like a charming movie where the boy and girl do live happily ever after. Her writing was filled with insight and detail and such warmth.
Margaret read a piece she’d written based on questions she asked her husband and which led to a description of a lurching ride on a Ferris wheel that was so vivid, I felt a little sick. She finished with a description of a moment on her honeymoon, standing with a glass of wine, feeling a Barbadian breeze, that literally left me breathless.
Afterwards, we had such an interesting discussion about what it means to call yourself a writer – we were, all of us, hesitant to apply that label to ourselves, often defaulting to saying, “I write,” but stopping short of saying, “I’m a writer.”
I wonder – is this down to confidence that maybe comes with time? Or is it because we compare ourselves to others and find ourselves not as “writerly” as somebody else? Maybe it’s because we feel that what we have to say isn’t important. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that it takes courage to put yourself and your words out there in the world as these ladies are doing.
I can only speak for myself but for me, writing is like breathing – it’s natural and automatic and if I don’t do it for a while, I get a little panicky.
For some us – and we know who we are – writing is life.
P.
P.S. Many thanks to the ladies of the Georgian Bay Memoirs Writing Club for such a warm welcome and the chance to spend an afternoon among other writers – it was a rare treat.