October Meeting Minutes 2018

Hi Everyone, Today we held our October meeting.

PRESENT: Ryan, Marlys, Jan, Deb, Dawn, Sharon, Pete.

TALKING STICK: This year’s book party was light on attendance but we have had 20 or more emails from writers who wanted to attend or planned to attend and then had a date conflict. We got all the rest of the books mailed out and we are receiving donations and more book orders. We’ve also gotten emails stating how much people enjoyed the workshop and readings this year. We added a prize for humor this year and we think it was a great addition.

With Ryan’s help, we also looked at the Red River Event Center in Akeley, MN. It is a very nice space but we would have to pay to have them close the whole place down for the day for us and we decided to stick with Smokey Hills for next year. We have the date of September 21, 2019 reserved for the next book party. Next year, we will know to have them heat the room up first for us, if it is a cold fall. Next year, we will know to just set up tables enough for 30 to 40 people and just use extra chairs for the book party.

WRITING EVENTS: Mike and Niomi were not present so we had no PRLAAC meeting reports.

Ryan told us a little more about his retreat for May 2019. We are almost ready to put this out on the website and email writers to start getting people signed up for this event.

Marlys went to a poetry reading recently called Verse Like Water with poet Mary Szybist. This is the visiting poet program at Central Lakes College in Brainerd, MN. www.clcmn.edu/vlw.

Dawn saw some of the MN Book Awards winners at the Library in Bemidji, MN.

ONLINE CLASSES: Sharon loves online poetry classes at the Loft. She has no time to do any of them right now, but the other day she had the urge to write something and she started searching for prompts online. Below are some good places to find prompts. Sharon does her best writing when she has an assignment. With no class available at the moment, she took some of the prompts and “assigned” herself to write something. It worked!

WRITING PROMPTS: Go to Poets & Writers at www.pw.org/tags/writing-prompts-exercises

to find writing prompts for fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.

Search prompts challenge to find many more writing prompts.

Deb suggested Discord.com which is a worldwide chat with a section for writers. She found some good prompts there:

  1. Write a poem in diary form. At the end of the day, think about your day as a poem.
  2. Pick a letter of the alphabet. Choose a topic that starts with that letter. Then write a poem about it. The whole poem CANNOT have that letter in it anywhere but the title. Try to do it with all 26 letters. This was quite a challenge!

We took turns reading and critiquing each other’s work. Hope to see you next time!