We meet at 4:45 P.M. for dinner and fellowship. You can bring your own dinner from home or from one of the many take-out style restaurants in the area near the hospital, or you can purchase it from the hospital cafeteria or vending machines down the hall.
In 2010, we would like to resume our quarterly celebration dinners. In these, our dinner hour every third month includes a special treat supplied by one of our members and a light gift exchange. We call these "celebration" dinners because we use them to congratulate any members who have had birthdays or anniversaries in the previous three months. Also at these meetings, we exchange little blessings like dollar-store goodies or small writer's gifts. Every attendee who brings a gift is welcome to select a gift to take home.
At 5:45 P.M., we open the public portion of our meeting with prayer and a Bible devotion. Next, we cover the latest good news and reports from our members. If we have learned anything new about the writing life and/or business of writing, we share that as part of our new business.
After the business is taken care of, we may have a speaker from outside the group, we may work on a writer's exercise, or we may receive a presentation from one of our own members. Our speakers have included authors like Jan Watson who won the 2004 "Operation First Novel" award from the Jerry B. Jenkins Writer's Guild, the publishers from "Kentucky Monthly" magazine, our local poet laureate, and many more.
In our writing exercises, we have a lot of fun and always learn something new, even if it's just that it's hard to read a fill-in-the-blanks story while laughing, and that knowing parts of speech is worth the humorous result at the end. As for our members speaking to us, we believe in spreading our wings and practicing what we have learned about writing and speaking in the comforting presence of our fellow Christian writers. Our members have spoken on topics such as personal journaling, how to speak about your writing, how to write book reviews, and much, much more.
The public portion of our meeting runs until approximately 7pm when we take a 15 minute break to catch our breath and dismiss those who need to leave early. During this break, we also try to collect an offering to help our speaker/scholarship fund, and we make an exchange of prayer requests available to members. If we have had a speaker, we like to use this time for attendees to purchase any wares the speaker may have provided for sale.
Finally, from about 7:15pm to 8:30pm, we regather in small groups for our critique session which is open to members and invited guests. This monthly critique exchange is one of our greatest membership benefits and it has helped to improve the writing of our members and started many of them on the road to being published--and paid. New visitors are welcomed and encouraged to sit in during our critique sessions to learn how we work in them, and they are even encouraged to share their opinions if they like. After all, writers are readers too. More information about critiques and why we restrict work for critique to members only can be found on our detailed critique page. Choose "Critique Groups" from the side menu or just Click Here.
If any or all of these activities sound interesting to you, we welcome you to join us on any 2nd Saturday throughout the year. We look forward to meeting and visiting with you and learning about you as a writer whether you are just starting out or have already been published multiple times. We gather to learn from each other and to walk together down the road from creation to publication, whether that means publishing a memory book for our grandchildren or writing the next great best seller. We hope you will join us soon. Please go to either the "Home" or "About Us" page for a map and location information.
P.S. If there are some activities you would like to see increased or decreased as part of our meeting format, please get in touch with us by e-mail, or attend our annual planning meeting in January to help us brainstorm the upcoming year. We welcome and encourage as many ideas as we can gather.
