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April Meeting Minutes 2021

Hello Everyone, today we held our April 18, 2021, JWB meeting.

PRESENT: Ryan, Mike, Mary, Deb, Marlys, Jan, Dawn, Sharon.

TALKING STICK 30:

Decisions have been made on our submissions. We are now waiting for the final decisions from our judges for the first and second places in each genre. We had 160 writers who submitted this year. It seemed like we had a few more stories than usual, perhaps because we allowed a slightly longer word count this year.

We still can’t plan for a book release party this fall. If we do have something, it might have to be October instead of September. We hope we can at least have an online virtual workshop again this year.

WRITING EVENTS:

PRLAAC—Mike read us some items from the meeting minutes. The PRLAAC group hopes to do some things this year, such as concerts, murals, Lifelong Learning, etc. The Armory is now open for small events. Blank Canvas will have a show in August. The library is going to have some events for writers on screen plays. PRLAAC is dropping the story telling event, at least for this year.

Coming up in June—Northwoods Writers Conference in Bemidji, held virtually again this year. VIRTUAL 2021 MNWC June 21 – 26. https://www.northwoodswriters.org/

The League of Minnesota Poets presents: Unmute! A Spring Poetry Conference. April 23-25, 2021. Reconnect to poets and poetry via this online conference! Supporting the Conference: In recognition of the challenges presented by COVID, this conference will be supported through a pay-as-you-are-able model. https://www.mnpoets.org/

One of our writers told us about the NYC Midnight Short Story competition. They give you different prompts and you have a certain number of days to write a story. You can progress through different rounds. There are other categories also, such as an exactly 100 word micro-fiction story.

http://www.nycmidnight.com/competitions/ssc/challenge.htm

Mary attended the UND 52^nd annual Writers Conference. It was virtual this year. It had 3 full days of speakers and readings. Mary has attended this many times and always enjoys it.

All of these sound like good ones to attend. Being in person for these events was always great, but now with the virtual events, many of us can perhaps attend when we weren’t able to before.

MISCELLANEOUS:

We were fascinated when Ryan introduced us to the Palindrome poem form a few months ago. He is now working on writing one. We can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

We are so enjoying our word prompt assignments each month. We send out a list of 5 to 9 words and encourage anyone, if they wish, to write a poem or short story to bring to the next meeting. If you don’t wish to, then you just bring whatever you are currently working on, like usual. It is amazing the variations that we see from these word lists. It has started some of us writing again after a dry spell. This has been great fun. There are good books that can help with this: 1200 Creative Writing Prompts by Melissa Donovan, 31 Days of Poetry Prompts by Jim Russo.

We took turns reading what we have been working on lately. Our writings always inspire helpful suggestions and good conversation. Hope to see you all next time!