With huge thanks to Roddie for providing this write-up of our last meeting (31 August) – not only did he chair it…he took the notes as well!
The summer holiday season had taken its toll on attendance and we were down to just a fantastic five at our recent fortnightly meeting. However, there was plenty to discuss. Roddie had his turn in the chair.
Abby said that Creative Dundee’s Pecha Kucha (a multi-media talk/event) was fully booked for November but that there might be a slot available for Nethergate Writers in February 2017. We thought that a production, which would give snapshots of our work and what we do as a group, would be something worth putting together soon, in case a vacancy did come up in November through a cancellation. A pecha kucha consists of twenty slides, twenty seconds per slide and with a total time of six and a half minutes. It was decided that it would be useful for some of us to go to the November Pecha Kucha show and Abby and Rosie would look out for tickets.
Rosie said that our group membership of the Scottish Association of Writing Groups (SAW) had been accepted and an affiliation certificate had been received. SAW offered to send someone along to one of our meetings to explain more about the society. We thought that a date before Christmas would be good- as soon as a date for the AGM was established.
The AGM was provisionally set for the 17th of November. Fiona had made bookings for Oct 18 in 2F03, Nov 17 in 2F10 and Dec 12- 2F10. We were relieved to hear from Ray that he had been contacted by the Uni and informed that Zoe`s classes would indeed, restart in October.
Roddie passed round a copy of the soon to be released anthology of Dundee poetry “Seagate III” which is edited by Andy Jackson. We were pleased to see that works by five current or former Nethergate Writers were included. Roddie mentioned that his story set in a science lab had now appeared on Lablit.com.
Next item was competitions. Fiona mentioned that Creative Scotland had a call out for poetry about the Scottish coastline (deadline Oct 17). Roddie noted that the Templar Poetry folio competition closes on September 9th and submissions (poetry, prose, articles) for New Writing Scotland close at the end of September.
Dundee Rep are hosting a Hatch workshop on September 10 between 2-5 pm. The idea is to encourage collaboration between writers and the theatre. Roddie intended to go along and report back. The remaining business centred on publicity items for the group. Rosie had drafted up a flier for circulation and Abby kindly volunteered her husband`s graphical design skills to produce an A5 leaflet. The flier would direct readers to the website where Craig plans to put up a welcome notice. Abby suggested getting NW business cards made while Craig suggested bookmarks with details about NW. Rosie agreed to look into bookmark printing.
Rosie mentioned that she had been in touch with our old mentor and founder, Esther Read. Esther was delighted to hear that the group was still flourishing after her retirement. She also mentioned that some royalties had come in from Amazon ebook sales. The group then discussed the idea of making a short e-pamphlet with the delightfully salacious title “Fifty Shades of Tay” which could include fifty very short pieces or fifty, fifty –word poems. Fiona suggested making them stories and Abby suggested an upper size limit. The idea was that this would be available to download for free from Amazon, thus serving as a publicity tool. The group thought this could also be printed on paper to give out for publicity purposes – for example at the Dundee Literary Festival in Oct 2017. This item would be brought back for further discussion at a future meeting.
Moving on to the reviewed work, there were two pieces, both on mountains, by Roddie.
The Old Man and the Mountain concerned the psychological need to climb and the physiological effects of doing so. It was liked by all. A suggestion was made that if the stanza which contained Scottish named peaks was removed, it might have a wider appeal.
The second piece A Fleet of Mountains Seen from Over Rosyth likened the mountains rising from the haar, to battleships steaming into the flat calm of the carse. Some issues raised over the poetic licence taken with geography, were constructively resolved by re-ordering a couple of lines.
The evening was concluded with a writing exercise which involved writing a start to a story using three different approaches- eg: using point of view, general events, dialogue or a variety of other devices. We read out our pieces and discovered how this approach not only advanced the plot/story line, but also suggested that some approaches made it easier to choose who the narrator should be.
Once again, a fun-filled, interesting evening. Next meeting will be on the 14th of September at 7 pm in 2S11.