Well last night saw us all back on the end of a zoom call again. At some point sometime, somewhere we will get back to face to face meetings again. Trust me it will happen. We just need to be patient and keep safe. Anne had to depart early because of a migraine so hope you’re feeling better today and also a big shout out to Isobel who’s not been keeping well over the holidays. Anyway one bonus of our zoom meeting was that Leela Soma was able to deliver her adjudication and insightful comments in person, so to speak. All 10 entries, she said, were of magazine standard and making the final selection was a very subjective process so everyone should be proud of their work. Leela concluded by mentioning that there are lots of on-line poetry competitions out there so don’t be afraid to send your work out there.
The winners (of course everyone’s a winner really) were:
1st Place………………….: Tony Watt (The Judas Tree )
2nd Place…………………: Margaret Grant (Passing Through)
3rd Place…………………: Morris Lindsay (I Am Leaf)
Highly Commended..: Christine Whitelaw (Autumn )
After tea we had our second speaker of the evening (from SAW) Palo Stickland who began an interesting discussion on inclusivity. She began with the diversity statement from the Romantic Novelist Association: be kind, be you, we write better that way. Wise words but it can be difficult to see the mote in our own eye. To this end Palo suggested a club questionnaire asking questions from gender, age and ethnicity to sexuality, disability and religious beliefs. But as Margaret pointed out there is a thin line between inclusive and intrusive.
One possibility is to spend some of the Windfarm funding money on identifying suitable groups on social media. Then posting an example of our writing (perhaps Tony’s winning poem – with his permission) along with an invitation to or club pointing out that though we write in English we do welcome writers whose first language is not English. If necessary the poem and the invitation could be translated into the appropriate language. Anyway there were a lot of ideas kicked about, so plenty of food for thought.
In other news our Scottish Icon book got held up a little by Xmas. We will get one more proof copy done to check for errors then we will poll members to see how many ‘author’ copies (these are discounted) we run off before the book goes public, probably at the end of the month. Next week’s meeting on Jan 12th is a Social Writing Group hosted by Laurie featuring a virtual book swap/recommendation. Oh and if anyone is interested in the Scottish Book Trust ‘Celebrations’ Laurie has some spare copies.
Ho Hum, onwards and upwards.