‘Eat, drink and sleep in Mungrisdale’ beckons the pub’s website. Now on Thursday 14th December 2023, at the Mill Inn in Mungrisdale, at 10.30am, you can add writing to the list, too!
Looking forward to seeing you.
Thursday 14th December 2023
meetings
Long time no post …
Long time no post, dear friends, but the good news is that the story and the stories of Mungrisdale Writers have continued during the course of the pandemic, post-pandemic, and onwards and upwards!
What a pleasure it is to publish details of our next meeting, at Mungrisdale Village Hall, on
Thursday 19th October 2023 at 10.30am
Please bring your own tea or coffee, your poetry and your stories, your boundless imagination, and joy in the renewal of friendships long held dear.
Angela writes in April 2020
Dear Mungrisdale friends
I hope you are keeping well and safe. I have been thinking of you all a great deal in recent weeks, and really missing your inspirational writing and our happy times at Mungrisdale. I am hopefully very much recovered after my operation and this week is Week 8 of that recovery, when I would normally be back with you all! So I thought that, if you are slacking in a world weary sort of way, ‘in the bliss of solitude’, lying on your couch (as in couch potato?) or raring to go, I would give you a little exercise to stir the old brain cells into action.You may have this email twice as I will ask Trevor to pass it on if he would be so kind, just in case I miss anyone off the list.
During the last war, housewives particularly were asked to write a diary of daily experiences. Some of these accounts became famous after the war and really reflected the privations of a nation under extreme stress. There was also humour, pathos and tragedy in those intimate reflections. We have become so used, very quickly, to the strange country of pandemic – social distancing, PPE, battling for slots at 11 o’clock at night with supermarkets, hand washing, Lockdown, to name but a few. As writers, it seems to me important to record these extraordinary times, even if it is a while before we want to revisit them when it is all over. There are unique challenges of isolation, the inability to see family and friends, or even to talk to neighbours. I would really like you to begin to record these times through poetry or prose.
For myself, I have found, having been in isolation with my husband for at least a month, and probably before that because we were in isolation since the beginning of January, waiting for my operation, I long to go to the beach, I am afraid to think about going to shops again, worry about running out of essentials, but at the same time by myself much enriched by silence and quiet time and stillness. The pleasure of a daily walk is intensified.
I will try to give you a short exercise occasionally, while we are all in isolation, which you are very welcome to do. You can send them to me directly. I cannot promise to answer or comment on each one immediately, but I will do my best. I would also like you to keep them in a file for when we come together again and we can tell each other how we have fared.
This time I would like you to write either a piece of flash fiction, strictly no more than 100 words, a short poem, or a piece of descriptive prose, and again no more than 100 words, on the subject of Lockdown. You can, as usual, take it in any direction you wish. Please please please put your name at the bottom of the piece and send it as a Word Document. It can be as personal as you like, and you can also tell me whether you would prefer that I do not share it. If Trevor, our esteemed secretary is willing, we can share some of them with you all.
Most importantly, I would also like to know from everybody whether you have managed to master Zoom, as I am planning to try to host a very short meeting – about 15 minutes, sometime soon as an experiment
In the meantime, my thoughts are with all of you, and my fervent wishes that you keep safe and well.
Warmest good wishes
Angela x
Homework for 18 April 2019
Colin Dixon writes
In the last class session we wrote about a place/landscape that was very special to us. Angela has asked that we write about the same place but this time as a paragraph for a travel brochure. This needs to be an objective travel piece without you in it.
If you were not at the last session write a brief description of a place that is special for you and follow that with the homework above. Our next session is on Thursday 18th April.
Spring!
Homework for 28 March
Colin Dixon writes
The homework for the next session on Thursday 28th March is to write a little slice of a play. No more than 300 words and don’t give any stage directions. The theme is that of meeting an old friend. Angela suggested that ‘Brief Encounter’ was an excellent exemplar.
An additional piece of work for those at the last meeting is to carry on with the work done in class where we put a character in a particular landscape.
Homework for 14 March
Colin Dixon writes
The homework for the next meeting on Thursday 14th March is firstly, to write half a page of prose which contains conversation or to write a poem which is a conversation. Secondly, extend your writing done in the session on Thursday 28th February, about time.
Homework for January 2019
Angela Locke writes
Homework for our next session on 17 January 2019 is to
Make a list of 10 places that are special to you in the Lake District
Circle one you would like to visit before our next session
Go to that place, spend a little quiet time there
Write about it
Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Thank you & Homework!
Angela Locke writes …
Dear fellow writers,
What a brilliant beginning to our term at Mungrisdale! It was a packed session, with such fantastic writing. Unforgettable, and ‘glorious’, to borrow Julie Carter’s word. I hope some of these pieces will find their way on to our mungrisdalewriters.com website. How lovely to see old friends after the summer. And to be delighted by special cakes to celebrate the meeting – a year ago – of our first MWG romance! And a double celebration as it is our 20th birthday, since we began at The Mill Inn, Mungrisdale in 1998, only much later moving to the brand-new village hall. It is wonderful to me that there are original members still attending, providing that precious continuity, as well as the wonderful flow of new people who have come to bring fresh lifeblood to our dynamic group.
As a celebration of our 20th year, I am asking everyone in the group to step up and begin to write that book which has always been there, nurtured with passion, something you care about profoundly. It can be a poetry collection, a novel, or even a collection of short stories. We began today in the class, and it was stunning.
Homework is to continue for another two pages, at least 300 words if it is prose. I echo Ann Miller’s words today, after that first writing session: ‘I really am going to write that book!’ That book is what is inside all of us, if we are writers.
I would like you to think too about the cover and the presentation, as Julie Carter so evocatively described, for her new poetry collection. And a title! This is the book you could open if you were in a quiet room, in isolation, by yourself, even in a cell. The book you would like to read, which says so much about you, which gives so much back to you, and to others.
Every session I am going to ask you to write at least another two pages. There will be other homeworks too, as options, but not something you have to do. This is a discipline. I would like you to keep going for the whole of the term, and at the end you will, if you keep going, have a surprising body of work. We may only have time to read the next 300 words in class, but please do more if the Muse takes you. It is your work, what defines you!
I am looking forward so much to hearing you all.
Love and light, Angela x
An invitation
The Power of Story | Please click to enlarge
Running The Red Line at George Fisher
An evening with Julie Carter at George Fisher, Keswick, 24th August 2018 at 6pm
Letting go
Ashes to ashes,
Can I bear to let them go?
I know that I must
Horace, my loving canine friend,
They say all good things must come to an end.
Wherever you went, it was always the same,
With people drawn to you like moths to a flame.
Now your spirit flies free,
But your bones I can’t yet let go;
Ground down to white dust in a container by the door,
Lie cherished fragments that wait beside me as I sleep,
Until I feel ready to cast you into the wind
Like a cloud of cherry blossom,
Settling on the foreshore,
Washed away by the tide,
Imbibed into the saline bloodstream of Mother Earth,
Nurturing her as you nurtured me,
As you nurtured those you touched.
Kevin Turpin
Gatecrasher
Wedding Reception
In Colorado mountains
Bull elk gate crashes
Dancing in full swing
Enjoyment and fun
Sudden dash to the window
Cameras flashing
Bull elk wants to join us
Who can get the best picture?
We all knew there was danger
But he stayed where he was
He did not move
Posed for photos
Stayed for entertainment
Dorothy Crowther
Homework for 10 May
Find out about cave painting, and what it is, and how it relates to your work. Had you been alive before the days of words what would you paint (upon the back walls of your deep, dark, mysterious cave). Your painting might never be found so you can be honest and straightforward. It’s a journey for you, and for any who may find what you leave there. What will you write-without-writing to speak of your soul?
300 words flash fiction, or a poem
Homework for 26 April
1 – Write something themed around the villages beneath Blencathra, poetry or prose. 200 words. Can you link it into your experience with Mungrisdale Writers?
2 – Make 2 lists of things you remember about your maternal / paternal grandparents. Then circle something in one of the lists that especially stands out. Write a paragraph to explain why.
Wild Tulips on the Omalos Plain
In April the snow on the high peaks of the Lefka Ori mountains in western Crete is usually receding as warmer weather arrives. This snow is often stained a pale reddish brown from the wind blown dust of the Libyan Sahara. The locals still refer to these dusty winds as Gaddafi’s breath. Omalos is a small farming community on a 1500metre high, flat, fertile plain midway between Chania on the north coast and Chora Sfakion on the south. Apple trees delineate the small fields of wheat, potatoes and okra. Small round stone houses called mitata are used for making the local graviera cheese and also a softer creamy version of feta. Rickety fences protect the crops from flocks of sheep and goats which roam freely. It is because of the protection afforded by these fences that so many of Crete’s profuse wild flowers are found at the edges of these crops.
Crete is a botanist’s dream, especially in April, with around two thousand flowering plant species. Many of the plants are spiky such as spiny burnet and others are poisonous such as sea squill and oleander and these the sheep and goats avoid. Many other plants grow on the steep limestone screes and cliffs and their inaccessibility affords protection. By looking carefully around some of the field edges of the Omalos plain you will almost certainly encounter one of the five species of wild tulip to be found on Crete. It is here that you may find clumps of the endemic wild variety called tulipa bakeri. About half the size of the shop bought varieties we are used to they are a pinky lilac shade with delicate pointed petals. In the strong breezes they dance around with a natural gestural eloquence that all tulips possess.
Colin Dixon
My loves
Where to start
My love is life itself
Favourite loves change with age
More gentle past times play a part
Music, sailing , oceans and rivers
Still stir my heart
Family – the bond of love ever strong
Grandchildren on the cusp of life
What will their future bring
I want to know but cannot
Contented now
Log fires, red wine and friends
Michael Bohling
Evening with Angela Locke
Locating the Word
From the programme for Words by the Water, Sunday 18 March, 4pm (£9)
Angela Locke has run writing retreats on Iona for 20 years, a place that offers powerful inspiration. For Ian Hall it was the sale of Thorneythwaite Farm in Borrowdale, his childhood home, that prompted his extensive research into the farmstead’s 1,000-year history. They discuss how writing can be animated by a sense of place.
Thorneythwaite Farm, Borrowdale (Orchard House Books) & Whale Language: Songs of Iona (Indigo Dreams Publishing)
Homework for 22 March
Write a non-fiction Nature Column in 300 words. This will involve your powers of observation over a period of time. It might prove to be a bit philosophical, and / or reflective / meditative, or simply observed fact. Use of your personal life-experience might call upon work-related experiences and so on.
The book The Long View (Somewhere-nowhere Press) was mentioned as a resource and inspiration. From the programme for Words by the Water, Tuesday 13 March at 4pm (£9)
What do trees witness? What do they mean to us? What is being done to protect them and increase tree cover? Writer Harriet Fraser and photographer Rob Fraser visited seven ordinary trees in extraordinary Cumbrian locations over two years in all weathers, night and day in the company of school children, ecologists, land managers and tree specialists.
Homework for 8 March 2018
‘Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens’
Homework for 8 March
Make two columns: in the first, write a list of at least ten things that you love – things rather than people. In the second, write something more specific: eg Library | Mary Oliver or Garden | Weeping Willow.
Then turn the columns into a little piece of writing, poetry, prose or … song!
Homework for 22 Feb, with love x
In the month of Valentine Angela’s homework for our next meeting on 22 February is to write up to a page about ‘Love.’ It can be a short play, prose or poetry about love. Angela said she would prefer it to be about romantic love although it could be ironic or about sibling love. Angela cited Shakespeare’s Sonnets on love as being good examples which are particularly ironic about love.
Homework for 11th January 2018
The homework set at the last meeting on the 23rd November was to do a blog entry.
Imagine you have a blog and create a blog piece about anything you want. Aim for ‘divine creativeness’. It could be something from your day or a recent event or just a random idea you want to share on your blog. Limit it to 200 words. Have it ready for the first meeting of 2018 on the 11th January.
To help you with this look at Kathleen Jones’ ‘A Writer’s Life‘ blog
The next meeting on the 14th December is a Read and Share starting at the normal time. It will finish a little early for the Christmas lunch at the Horse and Farrier, Threlkeld.
CD
Angela Locke writes
24 November 2017
Dear fellow writers
An amazing session today. Thank you all of you who braved the weather to be there, though we did have some diminution in numbers because of the weather forecast. We explored the nature of writing, and where Art ends and technique/skill begins. The powerful tool of stream of consciousness writing produced some fantastic work, really inspiring from everyone. This is the raw material from which you will extract your refined product! I was conscious of how much good writing there is in this group – real talent, and so wonderful to listen to and explore, all memorable.
Colin Dixon will kindly send you homework, and although this is my last session this year I will see you, of course, after your Read and Share session in 3 weeks time, for our Christmas lunch! I’m looking forward to it very much.
Warmest good wishes
Angela xx
Homework for 23rd November 2017
Write a completely unpunctuated piece (prose or poetry) and set yourself a strict 10 minute time limit to do this in. No capitals, full stops etc. It should be a stream of consciousness writing form relating to an event or moment in your day. Something that moved you during that day. Possibly seasonal.
Then write it again with full punctuation. Keep both versions.
Homework for 26th October
Our next session on the 26th October 2017 will explore magical realism. So, for homework, write a ‘magic piece,’ the beginning of a story that must involve a magic being and either / or sunrise / sunset. No more than 200 words, poem or prose
Homework for 12th October
On the 28th September attendees were given a photograph of a sunset and asked to place someone in that setting as the beginning of a story, novel or poem. For those who weren’t there, here’s a sunset photo for you!
Autumn Term and AGM 2017
We’re looking forward to Autumn Term beginning for Mungrisdale Writers on Thursday 28th September 2017 from 10.30am-1.30pm. Bridge building works may occupy some of the VH Car Park so please arrive early enough to park a little further away than usual.
On 12th October 2017 we will be holding a short AGM at 10.30, followed immediately by our normal session with Angela. The Agenda, Minutes of the AGM 2016 and notice of various proposed small changes to our Constitution may be linked to hereunder (and have been sent by email to all members). We hope you can attend.
The Annual General Meeting of Mungrisdale Writers 2017
Revised Constitution of Mungrisdale Writers October 2017
NEW Autumn & Spring Terms 2017/18
please click to enlarge
Read & Share, 27th July
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SaveSave
Homework for 28th September 2017
i write about a garden
ii look up Andrew Marvell’s poem The Garden
iii incorporate the named quality on your blessing card from 13 July
– or a quality you decide upon yourself
Illumination
Can a snail think? –
asked Joaquin of Janine.
Sagacious the Snail
slithered and smiled
his ponderous route
down the turret face
of the Baptistery of
La Sagrada Familía
They’re obsessed with
themselves – his feelers
reminded him
Humankind thinks
itself the centre
of the universe
and doesn’t allow
time for contemplative
snail sliding, or the
forest from which a
Christmas tree was
plucked or the
apple that will
surrender its life
and history to the
grace of a sparkling
cider
Nor do they wonder
how far down below
them this hardest of
all rocks began to form
millennia ago before
being raised and washed and
dressed and hammered and
shaped into sky-searching
spires in a Temple of Light
that gives part-lie to the
weakness of my snail-like
philosophy
For here in and
on this basilica in
Catalan sunlight one
contemplative member of a
sometimes brash
homo sapiens has
afforded space and
glory and its own unique
history of species to an
oddly permanent Christmas
tree, fruits in painted
stone and giant snails
among other creatures on
an unimaginably spiritual
journey
Anton Gaudi really gets snails
and apples and rocks and trees
And illumination
Simon Marsh
Homework for the 13th July
Another happy and well-attended gathering on the 8th June welcomed a new member who already proved herself an inspired writer. We were glad to hear from some who were unable to be with us but sent greetings – from as far afield as sunny Spain. And it was great to have Angela safely home from la belle France, and to share in some really quite splendid writing. Nature and animal life loomed large in our session and some moving writing was shared and celebrated. Homework for the next meeting, on Thursday 13 July at 10.30-1.30, arises out of that experience:
Either, develop the piece worked on today, or choose a new bird, animal or fish. Write in first person inhabiting its world and speaking with its voice. Research your choice. Why are you drawn to it. What is your North American totem animal? Research some good nature writing and maybe be willing to share your findings when we meet.
Happy writing!
What are words worth?
The Poetry of Stone
Wednesday 26th April 2017, 6-8pm, Free entry
All Hallows Centre Fletchertown
allhallowscentre.org.uk
Join us for a fascinating evening of shared poetry, conversation and insights into the work of sculptor, Rowena Beaty. Rowena will talk about the powerful influence of landscape and stone on her work. The event is kindly sponsored by Solway Arts.
Interested? Contact Susan Allen
enquiries@wordsworth.org.uk or 015394 35544
@WordsworthTrust | Facebook/WordsworthTrust
Read & Share
Huge thanks to committee member Tanya Laing who was this term’s Read and Share facilitator this morning.
Twenty-six sparkling pieces of writing were shared and celebrated. As a relative newcomer to Mungrisdale Writers I am often stunned and deeply moved by the breadth, quality and variety of the works shared.
For those who requested the details – the beautiful piece of music Tanya chose to lead us ‘Into the Mood’ was Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel from the album of the same name, available at Amazon UK here.
Epitaph for a Tree by Argentinian poet Silvina Ocampo is part of a collection, available at Amazon UK here.
Grateful thanks, too, to those who kindly sent apologies and greetings for today. And to the bakers!
Summer Term first meeting on the 11th May. AwayDay on the 25th May. Next Read and Share billed for the 27th July, 10.30-1.30. All 2017 dates here.
Word Mess
Just a reminder in case your diary fell down the back of the sofa… Word Mess open mic night is on NEXT TUESDAY!
Come and hang out in our Mess Hall and listen to some great new writing – or, if you’re in a sharing mood, bring something you’ve written yourself, or a short piece by a favourite writer.
Tuesday 25th April 2017, 7pm, for 7:30 start
Penrith Old Fire Station (between the hospital and ambulance station, so there isn’t far to go if you get overwhelmed by all that wordy goodness).
See you there! 🙂
Read & Share 20 April
We’re looking forward to our Read & Share on the 20th April from 10.30-1.30. Please bring about 25 copies of your short piece to share (around 100 – 150 words) – especially if you hope to invite critique from the group. Include your name at the top! Critique may then be written on a copy during the session and handed back to you.
Tanya Laing has helpfully provided a brief and helpful note about critiquing …
Do you understand the poem / prose? What is it about?
What are your favourite words / images / phrases. Why?
What ideas would you like to see developed? Imagery / rhyme / scheme / characters
How does the poem / prose make you feel? Emotional response.
Is there anything you didn’t understand or wasn’t clear?
Towards Mellbreak
Marie-Elsa Bragg’s new novel has just been published and is available now in Bookshops and at Amazon
Rydal and Iona Retreats in 2017
Homework for 11 May
Hans Christian Andersen by Anne Grahame Johnstone – see art.co.uk for info’
At our meeting on the 6th April, tutor Angela Locke invited us to enjoy her copy of this framed painting. The work features Hans Christian Andersen and some of his stories can be identified ‘around the edges.’
Writers were asked to ‘keep in the mind’s eye’ an image from the painting and – there and then – allow a piece of writing to flow from that. Great pieces ensued and were shared aloud around the table.
Homework for presentation on the 11th May involves something similar. Jot down some stories ‘around the edges’ of your young life, and distil one or some of these into 100 words.
Memories
Countryman Poet Colin Armstong in Mungrisdale, 6 April 2017
Colin Armstrong is one of Mungrisdale Writers’ best loved poets. Every inch an inspired Cumbrian countryman, lover of nature and expert on Lakeland dialect, Colin’s poems are deeply resonant and evocative. This off the cuff recording was made during a coffee break midway through our meeting earlier today, 6 April 2017.
Read & Share
click to enlarge
Once in each of the year’s three terms Mungrisdale Writers are invited to choose a single, short, favourite piece of writing (ie, not a chapter or two of one’s latest novel!) penned in the last term, for sharing in turn. The second element of these gatherings will involve our getting ‘in the mood’ – perhaps by listening to a beautiful piece of music, or taking a short walk outside, followed by the writing of a new short piece that may or may not be shared. There’ll then be an opportunity to invite feedback from fellow writers that will be offered along the usual broadly agreed lines for critique (see iii above). With plenty of time for coffee, cake and catch up, these sessions will allow opportunities for sharing and celebrating all that we’re learning in the main, tutored, sessions of each term. The forthcoming Read & Share will be from 10.30-1.30 on the 20th April 2017.
Still centre and the unimaginable
i A death in the afternoon
They are lying in the hissing grass on a gauze green day above dappling sun mist. The past behind them like healed grazes on a flawless skin, a picnic together, an unknown future shining.
Winged beast am I in mortal sandwich.
Crunching darkness implodes. Reddish light. I bite.
I am wingless rising up to incredible light.
A faint echo below.
“There was a bloody bee in the lunchbox. I’ve bitten it. It’s bloody well stung me”
Eternity buzzes at me.
Bite versus bite, I am in effortless flight.
A free bee.
ii What to write?
Blue spots. I think they were called full stops once. Lines and squiggles called words. And I – sat here, in a room of friends and strangers, and the not-knowing that comes from that. Yet I am so full of words, overflowing at times, when I get going, so to speak.
I teeter along this line of knowing and not-knowing like the man in the film who walked the high wire between two skyscrapers in New York. Did you see that film? The drop was awesomely unimaginable. More unimaginable than the still point, but he was never still. Like Rilke he was circling and circling. And so I circle. Words that are only ever an approximation at best of anything I really want to say. Yet I am in love with them. Is it possible to love and be light, to land lightly, to balance and rebalance, to find the point of stillness here, now for whatever wants to arise, for the simplicity of that which emerges?
The film finished and he did it. He crossed the gap with all that space beneath his feet; he crossed and the story never ended and he was written about in books and feted and even this film was made about him. Speaking about how we all wobble around the still centre, balance and rebalance, live, settle, love, get over the unimaginable.
So what was I trying to say with these approximations of reality? It was something about the blue spots. I think they call them full stops.
iii Chair
Generations ago, someone sawed the legs in half.
Lower. Easier for breastfeeding the baby they said.
She had bought it a new red cushion. Shiny satin.
Comfier to sit on, they said.
She had polished it, lovingly, using only pure beeswax.
No noxious fumes for the baby they said.
She practised sitting on it, imagining the swollen kicking mass that was her belly as a sweet suckling infant.
Good to get more rest they said.
The baby was born dead. She wept. She felt like her heart had been sawn in half.
The low chair, the nursing chair wept with her, tears trapped in beeswax.
Eileen Palmer
Two Ballet Dancers
Each of us was handed a calendar page at the writing group meeting the other day. ‘Look at yours for two minutes,’ was the instruction, ‘and then write whatever comes into your head.’
Two Ballet Dancers by Degas
Great art comes in most instances from great toil, even for the innately talented. Degas knew this deep in his mind and eye and fingertips. That bright melding of idea and technique for a finished work both showing and teaching us what was in this refining mind and eye.
Colin Dixon
When Boston was Venice
Each of us was handed a calendar page at the writing group meeting the other day. ‘Look at yours for two minutes,’ was the instruction, ‘and then write whatever comes into your head.’
So I looked – and could see and hear the sights and sounds of sunny Venice – and the writing that flowed is hereunder.
But I was fascinated by the origins of the unsigned work – and that led me, wonder of wonders, to Google’s extraordinary reverse image search which involved a quick iPad snap of the page, uploading that to the site, and hey presto, turns out that this fine work (dated around 1915) is by American artist Arthur Clifton Goodwin, 1864-1929, and is of T wharf in Boston Harbour, not Venice! Art transcends mere geographical boundaries! And yes, there’s another parable in there somewhere. Anyway, here’s what came out of the quick exercise, unedited, penned in about 5 minutes …
Brushmarks for Venezia
The Saturday boy at the
poshest café in Venice
sweeps the autumn leaves
into a corner of St Mark’s Square
Morning mist, now largely
dispersed, still hangs present
enough to filter the spectrum
over the Grand Canal upon which
gondoliers and industrial
boatmen and awestruck
travellers jostle and call
Thea is enthralled and in love –
already writing of romance
beneath the Doge’s Palace in her
heart and head –
‘Io parlo l’italiano molto bene!’
– and Julian aspires to
owning a gondolier’s hat
and marrying Thea at the
earliest opportunity
and returning here in
September and October
for the rest of their days
Simon Marsh
Homework for 23 March
Wow! The pens of eighteen inspired writers all but set fire to their papers in Mungrisdale this morning. Some of their work will be posted here over the next couple of weeks.
A huge welcome for those who have taken the big – and important – step of joining us for the first time. You thought you were looking for something from Mungrisdale Writers. Everyone else gained a huge amount from you! Welcome aboard.
Thanks, as ever, to those who kindly sent apologies. You were missed.
Heartfelt thanks, of course, for the inspirational Angela Locke, whose timely meditations call forth works from us that are nothing short of miracles at times. We’ve had such fun today (who could forget Trevor’s ‘Lily’?) – and been deeply moved, too.
And thanks to our chair Cathy Johnson who set us an interesting piece of homework for presentation at our next meeting on the 23rd March. Cathy proposed
In 100 words write a short scene in which a woman becomes invisible, briefly, for no explained reason … no one can see or hear her … she is not a ghost (prose or poetry)
Calendar pages
MARCH is here already – another turn of the calendar page – and hopefully you’ll have marked up yours with our March meetings – on the 9th and the 23rd. Proposed homework for the 9th is here.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we’ve been unearthing some of Mungrisdale Writers’ early work – some of which was published in now unavailable MW booklets years ago, and more of which was stored on the floppy disks of the time (1.44mb!).
The aquisition of a new floppy disk reader has enabled retrieval of the archived Voices of the Mountain – in which, among other fine work, the late Vi Taylor’s poem Blencathra was found.
Mungrisdale Writers will celebrate 20 years in 2019 and is still an inspirational bedrock for several original members, as well as a host of newer ones over the years. 7 or 8 new writers have joined the ranks in recent times.
All this is quite an achievement – and one which founder Angela Locke can rightly be proud of. We’ll seek to celebrate all this and more, in all sorts of ways – not least, I expect, in writing!
– M&P
More Tales in a Tearoom
at Allhallows Community Centre, Fletchertown, Mealsgate
(directions here)
Wednesday 29th March 2017 from 2-4pm
Guest Speaker David Tait
Resident Poet at the Wordsworth Trust
Weather and the Natural World
Wednesday 26th April 2017 from 6-8pm
Guest Speaker Ruth Charlton
Ceramicist
Cumbrian Characters
Admission Free | Refreshments including Tea, Coffee or Fruit Juice
and home made Scones | Suggested Donation £3.50
100 words for homework
Our tutor at Mungrisdale Writers is convinced that everyone absolutely loves housework homework and so always very kindly sets us some. (Well, sometimes not so kindly – some of it is really hard).
The latest homework doesn’t seem too bad though – even for serial homework avoiders – because it has a strict limit of 100 words set on it.
Definitely not 101 words, but as a special concession to our having had a fantastic first session of the Spring Term, there’ll be no penalty if you can only pen 99.
Homework for presentation on the 9th March – a flash fiction story with a beginning, middle and an end. No more than 100 words. Ready, steady … just get down to it …
Happy writing!
A passionate man (!)
A much loved Mungrisdale Writer sets forth his feelings
Confessions of a married man
I am a happily married man of many years and wish to confess an incestuous relationship with my new mistress. The affair has been rife for almost a year, my feelings are passionate, I write to her most days even if only in my thoughts.
My yearning for her disrupts my daily routine and affects the very rhythm of my life, but I am not a fool, I realise she cares little for me, she has many admirers both male and female, she is indifferent to whether I please her or not, she cares not for the agony I suffer searching for the perfect word, sentence or phrase just to please her.
We meet now every two weeks on a Thursday morning in a remote village, away from prying eyes other than those of other lovers using the same cover. I always do my best to impress her, but I always encounter others far more capable of holding her attention.
Whether she responds to my affection or spurns my future advances, my love is undying; her tentacles have a relentless grip.
My mistress is “Creative Writing” – our hideaway is Mungrisdale Village Hall.
Trevor Coleman
Mungrisdale Writers 