We meet at 7:30pm on
the first Thursday of
each month at
The Biffa Room,
St. Mark’s Church,
Calder Rise
(off Avon Drive),
Bedford, MK41 7UY
Visitors (18 and older) and prospective members are VERY welcome, whether experienced writers, beginners, or just curious. Simply turn up on the night or contact us by clicking on the 'Get in Touch' icon for an interesting, enjoyable, and possibly instructive evening.
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Who Are We?
We are a group of Bedfordshire writers, with diverse skills and abilities. We are brought together by an interest in writing, and the hope of improving our writing with each others’ help.
We run friendly and informal meetings and appreciate the opportunity to read our work for comment and criticism by other members and to share ideas for inspiration from some pretty
skilful writers. We regularly write a 'Round Robin' story where each member of the group writes a chapter. These are available to read on the Round Robin Stories page.
We encourage reading. This helps us to hear how our work sounds, which in turn is a great tool for editing. Generally speaking we limit each other to about 10 minutes reading time each so that we have time for constructive critiscm and feedback, and we all get a chance to read.
Visitors pay £3.00 per in person meeting.
Membership costs just £6 per year.
Members pay £2.00 per meeting to cover hire costs, etc.
We also enjoy social occasions such as a Christmas dinner, occasional outings, barbeques and other group events when possible.
The group holds regular meetings on the first Thursday of every month. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, we are currently holding meetings via Zoom rather than in person. Zoom meetings are easy to join: the chair sends a link via email shortly before the start of the meeting. Click on the link and follow the instructions. To use Zoom you need either a laptop with camera / microphone, or smartphone with camera / microphone. You will also need an internet connection and email address.
If you are interested in participating with the group via our montly Zoom meetings, please contact our chair on: andrew.stock2018@outlook.com
At our regular Zoom meetings we continue to read out our work and receive feedback from other members. We alternate between having specific themes to write about and no theme evenings to provide an opportunity to read work of your choosing.
Our next meeting is on Thursday 7th January at 7 pm. Bring a piece of work on the theme of New Resolutions of around 500 words / 5 mins of reading time, or feel free to bring a piece of work from your personal project - a short story, poem, or book extract.
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Meeting Report for October 2020
Sue Barton
Another Zoom meeting took place on Thursday 1st.
The topic for the meeting was writing a short parody of a piece of writing by a well-known author to be read and then have the other participants guess who the author was.
It worked well with most people writing a short piece of prose for the exercise. Laura, though, took more a novel (so to speak) approach and wrote several haikus. She didn’t make it easy but we managed to guess most of them. It was suggested that it would be good to have them on the website to show the wider world how we can inject a fun element into proceedings from time to time.
This is, of course, not to suggest that we find our writing anything but fun all the time!
The calendars that John Broadhouse has been working on so hard are now ready and reflect the collaboration between us and the Houghton Art Group. Do contact John if you would like to buy one (or more) either for yourselves or for Christmas gifts.
Hope to see as many of you as possible at the next Zoom meeting to be held on Thursday November 5th which we hope will go with a bang!