Reality Writes is now on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/realitywrites/
Add me as a contact!
(once again, I tried to add a cool widget to this page and it did not work. Permanent link coming soon.)
poetry group update October 26, 2007
Lindsey and I met up last Friday to have dinner and drinks at Creation to try to sort this whole poetry group thing out. As my earlier posts have suggested, I was feeling a bit doubtful about our ability to get this thing off the ground anytime soon. My schedule has been insane and so has hers, plus I was starting to feel weary about putting myself out there. Not only would I not have the time to dedicate to this to make it the next best thing in Charlotte, but taking on the role of a teacher was still something I wasn’t sure that I was ready to do. I’m not afraid of being a teacher – I think it’s something I could eventually do well one day, with a little training and more experience. But this would not be a classroom-like experience – it would be more like going on a blind date with 25 strangers and asking them to read their diary to you. Plus, I was afraid of starting this thing and then having a bunch of people latch onto me through it, and hence lose all control of my freedom, solitude and privacy (what little of it I have left in this city.) And most of all, one of the main reasons I was interested in something like this to start with was that I needed feedback on my work. If I’m leading a group, no one’s going to give me the honest criticism I need to be a better writer.
I was in the middle of my second glass of wine, working up my nerve to tell Lindsey all of this, when she started her own list of concerns. Turns out, she was having the same doubts I was. Then we (she) came up with something brilliant: let’s drop the public factor. Why not just get a group together of people we know – writers we know – and see if they want to meet up once a month to share work, have critique, and partake in writing prompts together? Yeah, why not? Yes, that’s what we decided to do, and I immediately felt the weight come off my shoulders. Then we had a laugh about how simple/stupid it was and how our perfectionistic tendencies got the better of us.
It will be kind of like a book club, except instead of reading a book, we’re all working toward writing a book. We still want to keep it poetry mostly, but we might stretch it a bit for a fiction friend or two.
And if it doesn’t happen before Christmas, then oh well. January’s still a good month to start new things.
