"Buckets of" Meeting Wrap

Something interesting happened at this week's meeting. Nothing you can really put your finger on but it felt as if, as a group, that we've turned a corner. It was as nice as it has been on any other occasion but I personally felt challenged and critiqued. It was very exciting and I hope to see more of this sort of behaviour. We truly do have the ability to make each other better writers.

Jill did a stand up job facilitating this weekend. We started with a stream of consciousness warm up. Upon reflection we learned a lot about how each member thinks. All the way from fully formed grammatically correct sentences to abstract words and pictures. Very interesting and certainly appreciated.

Jill also started us off with our "buckets-of-personal-pronoun-free" exercise. Jill's piece was about a morning sunrise and a beast in the midst. Nicole recounted an experience where she saw her Father crying; buckets of tears. Heather gave us a laugh with a poem and told us more about buckets of hope. Sue set us all (literally) in a conflict that involved buckets of bucks while Mike wrote two poems: "ethnic cleansing" buckets of blood and a second that cheerily described buckets of milk and water and BEER. Nina wrote a descriptive piece about a  loved one filled with emptiness, bringing to life memories. Marget write "In Fear of Fifty" Buckets of chirpy exchanges, a piece that brought new meaning to coming of age with a memorable line "the young of the old". Don wrote of Bruce the dunny man and his hilarious adventures cleaning out the honey buckets. A new comer Kate gave us a colorful description of a birds and buckets of water in a yard that are faced with a tom cat.

The meeting was a huge success and a great start to the new year. We're all looking forward to cabin fever days. Another idea that was brought forth was to bring your work for more in-depth critiquing. We've made a group to decision to go ahead and do this. On the February 8th any members that would like to pass out their work for an in depth critique should bring copies. If you would like to participate in the in-depth critique please comment on this blog post. This way we'll know how many copies everyone will need to bring.