Casco Bay Writers' Group

Moderator Contact Info

Peter Falkenberg Brown & Kimmy Sophia Brown
Publishers of the Significato Journal
http://significatojournal.com
207-518-9004, Portland, Maine

Meeting Schedule and Details

As of March 5, 2012, the Casco Bay Writers' Group has been transformed into a "Closed Group".

This was in order to manage attendance in a more practical fashion. We also reached a reasonable level of constant attendance, and can't grow more than a certain amount.

However, we are happy to receive inquiries about openings, and sometimes will have an open-house meeting for new guests. Please feel free to email Peter or Kim at the email addresses above. Meetings are held monthly, usually on Wednesdays, from 6pm to 8-ish pm.

Purpose

To have fun sharing each other’s writing. It’s for writers who would like to learn from their fellow writers, hone their craft and be inspired and supported by their writing peers.

Format of Meeting

Participants read their work, if they wish to. Listeners provide kind and constructive feedback.

Types of Writing

Fiction, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, articles, essays, humor; anything except boring technical manuals. Work can be finished or unfinished, whole or in sections.

Writing for a Mixed Audience

Writing can be targeted to adults or children, and should be palatable for a mixed audience.

No graphic horror or violence, excessive profanity, or sexually explicit writing.

What does this mean, exactly? Because the attendees of our writers' group can come from many different individual situations, we want to ensure that everyone in our group is comfortable with the content being read. Some attendees might have a very strong emotional reaction to graphic horror, violence or excessive profanity.

Reading one's writing about a romance between Rudolpho and Lucretia is perfectly fine. Reading that they "fumbled with their clothing and then made passionate love under the stars", probably won't make anyone feel awkward. However, reading detailed explanations of how they interacted with each other's bodies might be uncomfortable for some attendees.

Thus, if you're reading your long novel and come to the part where you graphically wrote about your couple's love making, simply summarize that part, or skip that part, for example, "... and then Rudolpho and Lucretia made love under the stars." Then continue to read about how they read the paper and smoked a cigarette after that :-).

If you would like feedback from members of the group about some of your writing that might not be comfortable for the whole group, it's perfectly fine to ask the group if you could email the text privately to those who might be interested.

Politics & Religion

Based on an atmosphere of mutual respect, political and religious writing topics are fine.

Valuable and Fun

Most of all, we want the meetings to be fun, relaxed, enjoyable and valuable to all who come.
 

About the Casco Bay Writers' Group

After searching and Googling and querying and asking about writers' groups in Portland, but not finding any, Kimmy Sophia and I (Peter) took the plunge and decided to start the "Casco Bay Writers' Group". We belonged to a very nice writers' group in Cornish, Maine, but wanted to have even more give and take with writers, especially writers in the Portland area.

So, we put out flyers and web postings, and on November 10, 2010, we had our first meeting at Pat's Pizza in Old Port. We are very grateful to the owner, Chris Tyll, and the manager, Dave Moran, for hosting our first meeting. We encourage everyone in the whole world to go to Pat's Pizza and buy something to eat or drink :-). We were very pleased to have a total of 10 attendees at our very first meeting, and we were even more gratified because of the very high quality of the writing! They were a very clever, witty, intelligent and nice bunch of writers.

Pat's Pizza had a very busy schedule in December, so we moved our meetings to the Albert Brenner Glickman Family Library. We want to again thank Pat's Pizza for helping with the birth of our new group!

We also want to thank Josh Bodwell, the Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA - http://mainewriters.org), for being a hosting sponsor of our meetings at the Glickman Library (which is part of the University of Maine's campus). MWPA has its offices in the Glickman building.

Note that since the group is now closed, we may decide to meet in people's homes. If so, we thank Josh once again...

~

And here I'm adding the incorrectly punctuated name of our group, so folks can search for it in various ways, like Casco Bay Writer's Group and Casco Bay Writers Group :-).