I tried out a writers’ group in Oceanside last week. I showed up cold turkey, with my laptop and no idea of what to expect–a writers’ group, and in Oceanside? The meeting was held in a yellow house that doubled as a cafe, with a wraparound porch and a long, narrow staircase, at the top of which was a small room with a long wooden table where our group assembled. I was the only woman in a room of six men, all over the age of 50 and looking very … seasoned. I introduced myself and immediately a corpulant man by the name of Dante called me “Allison.” That became the running joke, or at least they kept referring to me as Allison, and finally I said firmly, “There is no Allison here.” The men all looked at me and said, “We know.” That was a little off-putting, along with the fact that I didn’t have a heavy manuscript to read aloud from–I just didn’t know I should have brought one.
The group was thoroughly entertaining, however. Each man read a sizable portion of a larger work of fiction he was in the process of writing or trying to get published. And a lot of it was really, really good. I think being around people who are creative and brilliant, no matter how old or how weathered, gets the neurons firing furiously in your brain. I ate a Caesar salad, they all drank dark beer, and we critiqued each of the stories in a friendly but earnest manner, and it felt like I was in school again, engaging in that lovely thing called “community,” which is so difficult to find as a creative writer. The really nice thing was that I felt perfectly competant in the middle of a group where I was the oddball, the youngster and the girl. I felt like I could “do” the analyzing, the critiquing, the encouraging that goes along with taking someone’s work to the next level. I want to go back, but going back means I have to write something and read it out loud, which is going to be a lot more challenging than the critiquie part.
