A nice little group of us met today, on the sixth day of March 2021. See the recap below:

Group Updates:

• The WWG has officially been invited to participate in a virtual celebration of our published anthology, “View from the Shore!” This will take place on Wednesday, March 24th, at 7pm, and hosted by the Arts Consortium of Carver County. More details to come, but please contact literary@artsofcarvercounty.org to RSVP! More information is linked on the WWG Events page.
• You can now find our Anthology book in a few more local places:
  • Cream & Amber in Hopkins  – available for purchase online or in-store pickup
  • Unearthed Arts in Waconia – available in store
  • Outreach is also in the works with the Arboretum and the Carver County Library system, as well as other bookstores around the Twin Cities metro. Please refer back to our Anthology page for updates on who is currently carrying View from the Shore!

Sharing Pieces:

• We shared pieces on the prompt: “Eavesdropping on a conversation.” Nice work, everyone!
• (PLEASE NOTE: If members would like their past work, prompts or otherwise, featured on our WWG website, let Jen know! We have a page – In Our Own Words – devoted to highlighting work of our members who volunteer to share it!) 

Discussion:

• We are continuing our virtual Critique Sessions! The next session is Wednesday, March 10th, at 7pm on Zoom. Please use the contact form to request an invite!
  
  • • How we plan to use this time:
      1. We’ll kick off with a free-write, 10 or 20 minutes 
      2. We are going to use the rest of our meeting to focus on one of our goals mentioned above, critique and feedback!
         • Participants should bring a piece to this meeting they are currently working on and would like feedback on.
         • We have created a shared Google Drive folder to store our pieces for review and critique. If you would like to participate, contact Jen for access to this folder. We try to have pieces uploaded at least a few days in advance of the next session, to allow for comments and feedback prior to the meeting.
         • We will take turns reading our pieces and open the floor for critique.
         • We will agree on a time limit per member for reading and feedback.
         • We will also follow our unanimously agreed-upon “Critique Code” to make sure people feel comfortable and are on the same page with the critique process.
    • All are invited to this Wednesday night meeting; please know that we would like to stick to the two activities above during this time. We will be continuing our regular meetings the first Saturday of the month! 

Next Saturday Meeting:

Now that the weather is warming up and our community is slowly unfreezing, the group decided we would like to try an in-person socially-distanced meeting! Weather permitting, we will meet at 10:30am on Saturday April 10th*, at City Square Park in Downtown Waconia! Meet us by the gazebo! (Bring your mask and a lawn chair.)
NOTE: There will be a back-up virtual meeting planned, in the event Minnesota shows her full fickle early spring temperament (which she so often does).

Prompt for April 10th:
“Inspired By Actual Events” (use a story from the news or history books to inspire a short work of fiction)

*PLEASE NOTE: Original post had stated April 3rd as the in-person meeting; that date has been pushed back one week due to the Easter holiday landing on the first weekend in April!

Anything I missed? Go ahead and share in the comments below! ~Jen