Our U3A Creative Writing Group, Whittlesey Wordsmiths, is working on a new book, a follow up to Where the Wild Winds Blow, our first very successful attempt at writing and publishing. This new volume has the title: A Following Wind.
I am working on a new front cover for the book, something that conveys both a movement by wind and our Fenland landscape. Over the years I have managed to take photographs of what is for many people the defining feature of our landscape, the skies. Often at their most breathtakingly beautiful during sunrise and sunset.
The cover may be slightly different depending on the template restrictions but please take a look at it and let me have your feedback.
I wrote this piece as an entry for a flash fiction competition. A member of our writing group asked me if it was autobiographical, apart from the reference to Jimmy Mack all of it is the product of my imagination.
Do girls still dance around their handbags? Wondering, seeing again, remembering fondly the long-legged girls of my teens… Joyce would dance around her handbag with girlfriends in a circle, or sometimes in a line, to Jimmy Mack or Heatwave. All I could manage was a slow cuddle around the dance floor with her as When a Man Loves a Woman played. My efforts to dance more energetically or remotely in time with the music, were a lost cause.
Joyce was petite, pretty, bubbly, kind, and altogether lovely; I couldn’t believe my luck when she agreed to go out with me. We were together for a few months after leaving school – both fifteen. Joyce worked in a grocer’s shop; I was an apprentice car mechanic.
Joyce was adopted. The relationship with her adoptive parents wasn’t good; boyfriends weren’t allowed to visit her home.
One dark Friday night Joyce disappeared. There was no trace of her after that.
It left me heartbroken. The only information I had was that she had been seen at the station boarding a London train alone, with just a suitcase. A letter from her arrived a month later, apologising for the sudden departure and saying she would be in touch when things had sorted themselves out. There was no return address.
I heard nothing more, and a year later Rose entered my life. We fell in love and married – and were happy until Rose died suddenly last year.
I turned Joyce’s new letter over in my hands, wondering what to do next. Fifty years is a long wait to get in touch. Now it is my turn to pack a suitcase and catch a train to London. Perhaps in a few days we will return together, there is a lot to talk about.
The walkway at Lattersey Nature reserve the beauty of this scene constantly changes with the seasons
Whittlesey Wordsmiths are fortunate to have within their ranks, two published authors, winners of fiction writing prizes, a very able editor/ proof-reader and a talented biographer.
Set up under the Whittlesey U3A umbrella this local group meets monthly at the Scaldgate Centre in Whittlesey. Meetings are held every first Thursday of the month from 11am, anyone is able to attend a free taster session but will need to join the U3A to become a member of the group, the fee is £3 per meeting to cover venue costs.
At recent meetings we have been fortunate to have had presentations by two local authors on the intricacies of publishing a book, both in print and online. The talks were informal, informative and very instructive. Thank you Stephen Oliver and Stuart Roberts. Like many commonplace objects that successfully manage their function, we ignore the container, giving it little or no regard but delight only in its contents. In the same way that we ignore the jar the jam arrives in, caring little for its design, construction and functionality, so it is with a book. We care little for the printing unless the quality is so bad it makes reading difficult, little for the binding (unlike Samuel Pepys) but only on the written words within.
Publication, its details, fonts, layout, sizes, printing, copyright and a myriad other things, though only covered briefly, were for most of us a completely new field.
A current project is to produce a collection of work by the Wordsmiths in time for Christmas, these talks were a help in focussing attention on the job ahead. The content is being assembled with ease from the increasing pool of talent, that is the group. The hard work will probably be assembling it into a finished product, not the filling but the container.
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