January 6th 2003

Here are the minutes of our January 26, 2003 meeting. Six writers attended. The next meeting will be on February 16, 2003 from 1:30 to 4PM at Beagle Books in Park Rapids, MN.
We discussed the need for writing classes. We mentioned that people could possibly take classes at BSU, perhaps local English teachers would be willing to critique stories. Why aren’t there some community ed classes on writing?

TALKING STICK:

We discussed again the possibility of combining a book publishing with a writing workshop or two, perhaps a separate poetry contest that we would sponsor. An idea might be to just have three or four topics to write on and see what people would come up with. All attendees of the workshops or writers who entered the contest could receive past issues of the Talking Sticks. It might be easier to get a grant if we put a twist on it like this. Angele will not be able to do the grant requests. She has a list of 15 possibilities that she will e-mail to us so we can get to work on them. We need to get back from her the sample infor for writing grant letters.
Sharon will write to Cindie, Florence and Carolyn for their lists of where to write when we start to request submissions. We feel that we may as well get this started along with the grant requests.
Russ mentioned that he had seen a book called The Stuffed Owl which was full of poems by well known poets but they were all rejected poems, not their best. We could do something like that with any poetry contest we sponsored or perhaps with some rejects from Talking Stick submissions. We could call it Chicken Soup for Losers or something. Russ is always thinking.
Sharon said she would prefer to leave the names on the Talking Stick submissions. If the Talking Stick started out as a place for members of our group to be published, then we should give preference to our members. That will have to be decided at some point.

PAST TALKING STICKS:

All of the old copies of our Talking Stick books seem to now be at Bronson Page Books. We have no more of 2 and 5. Florence has #10 and perhaps she can deliver them to Bronson Page at some point. Sharon has a set of a few of each at her house now.
We are also going to be putting purchase information on the web site in the near future. We should probably charge $2.00 each for the older issues, perhaps $10. or $15. on the last two issues? Perhaps we could give away one of the old #1 issues with each order? Also, perhaps any local writer who attends our meetings could have a set of our books if they would like to have it, as long as we have so many extras.

REMINDERS:

Again, if any of us find out about places where we can submit writing, tell the other members so we can all benefit. The same goes for writing seminars.
Diane told us that you can get free business cards by going to www.vistaprint.com.
Thanks to those who attended. We hope more of you on our e-mail list will attend in the future. If you do not wish to be on the e-mail list any longer, please let me know. If you are aware of a writer who might be interested in attending, please send their e-mail address to sharrick@wcta.net.