Monday, February 22, 2016

Blocking the writer

I saw that an informal writers' group meets at the senior center nearby on Monday mornings, and I have been meaning to give it a try. Today the stars all converged and I went over. The center itself is a large place with lots of things going on. When I asked about the writers' group, a staff member volunteered to take me to where it met on the opposite side of the building. She mentioned on the way that she didn't know if anyone would show up. She showed me the board room, which was empty. A long table and a dozen empty chairs around it. The meeting was not scheduled to begin for a few minutes and she muttered something about "if anyone shows up" and left me to wait.

I wandered around the large room outside, looked at the community services literature available, noticed that South Central Library brings books by every couple of weeks the way the bookmobile did for the nursing homes in the Dells, looked at a puzzle that had already been completed and studied the lunch menus for the week. 

No one ever showed up.

I will give it a try once or twice more and then let it go. My first impulse was to go to the office and offer to try to get something going. But I would like to not-be-the-person-in-charge of things for a while. If I want to volunteer to run a writers' group of any sort, I can talk to the people at the library and see about doing a National Novel Writing Month project in November. The Madison libraries have a lot of NaNoWriMo things going on. If Sun Prairie doesn't have its own, I can offer to be the volunteer coordinator like I was in the Dells last year.

We'll see. By fall, I may have lots of other things on my plate.

2 comments:

Moving with Mitchell said...

I belonged to a writers group in Palm Springs that I loved but business made it impossible for me to attend regularly. Before that, I belonged to a very unkind group in San Diego. I wish I could find one here. As for volunteering, I just offered my services to an English language conversation group run by a local town government. Can't wait to get started.

Michael Dodd said...

There is a Spanish conversation/coffee hour on Wednesday's at the senior center, too. I am thinking about giving that a try to brush up on the old habilidades de lenguaje.