After many robust years our writing group floundered. We lost our beloved host and source, a woman gifted in the art of writing; a German intellectual with a German temperament; a union organizer who Marxsicized sonnets; and a beautiful California heiress with precision metaphors. Happily we are reconstituted with nine members who, no doubt, will appear in these columns from time to time. As I was accidentally reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book left in my car by my friend on the way to the airport, I began to feel a special thrill and loyalty for my own newly enriched writing group.
For the first time I began to understand how people can read book after book; it says right there that one story stimulates your imagination and that leads you to another book and another and so on. The same process is what drove me to wrestle with, create and enjoy the world wide web since its inception – one thing leading to another, endlessly. I wanted to email my group and make sure they had all read this book so that it would also enhance their own commitment to our writing group.
But I hesitated. At the first meeting of the 'new' group, the three members of the old group read selections. One of these was mine: "Grandmother Serial Killer" about just that. At the second meeting of the new group, a new member who already has an agent – a fact which made us super-anxious to hear her writing – read a story about a drug dealer and his Lesbian accomplices. When the group began commenting on the work, it was immediately apparent that the three original members all knew drug dealers and compared the writer's character to the dealers they had known in real life. The new members were now all looking at us sideways. Was this a 'writing' group or a front for a ring of as yet unidentified criminals? Stay tuned for the future of this local Potato Peel Pie group.
For the first time I began to understand how people can read book after book; it says right there that one story stimulates your imagination and that leads you to another book and another and so on. The same process is what drove me to wrestle with, create and enjoy the world wide web since its inception – one thing leading to another, endlessly. I wanted to email my group and make sure they had all read this book so that it would also enhance their own commitment to our writing group.
But I hesitated. At the first meeting of the 'new' group, the three members of the old group read selections. One of these was mine: "Grandmother Serial Killer" about just that. At the second meeting of the new group, a new member who already has an agent – a fact which made us super-anxious to hear her writing – read a story about a drug dealer and his Lesbian accomplices. When the group began commenting on the work, it was immediately apparent that the three original members all knew drug dealers and compared the writer's character to the dealers they had known in real life. The new members were now all looking at us sideways. Was this a 'writing' group or a front for a ring of as yet unidentified criminals? Stay tuned for the future of this local Potato Peel Pie group.