How Our Meetings Work
Online Meetings due to
COVID-19
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Our group meetings are held online on Google Meet. We use Google Docs with permissions enabled to edit or comment and share the links to our documents. Our online meetings follow the same format as our in-person meetings. If it is your first time joining the group, we ask for you to show up on webcam so we can put a face to a name. Some members have requested this procedure for safety reasons. After your first meeting, going on cam is entirely optional.
Online meetings take place every Wednesday from 7:00pm to 9:30pm. A different link will be posted weekly that leads you to a chat room. Sign up by joining our Meetup group or our Facebook group. Room opens at 6:30pm for those needing technical assistance. Instructions on how to create a Google Doc are also posted on our Meetup page.
How Our Meetings Work
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Attendance at our meetings varies from five to fourteen writers, depending on the season. You don’t have to read at every meeting. Many of our members read only occasionally but attend to take part in the critiquing.
During the meetings, we take turns reading. Once a writer has finished reading, the other writers in the room take turns in offering comments, criticism, and suggestions for improvement. Please do not argue with what others say about your work. You are free to ignore criticism, although most of us find it very helpful in improving what we write.
If you don’t wish to comment on another person’s writing, you can simply say, “I pass” and we will move on to other members of the group.
Writers of prose fiction read once per meeting while poets read their work twice.
Word/Page Limits
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Fiction: 1,500 words approximately
Poetry: No limit
Reading Order
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We operate on a first-come basis. If you wish to read, please arrive five or ten minutes before the meeting start-time of 7:00 p.m. This will ensure that your place on the list of readers is secured. If we run out of time before you have a chance to read, we will hold you over until the next meeting where you’ll be given priority.
Formatting Your Work
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Please leave space on the margins and between lines so that the rest of us can write comments on your handout and return them to you. Also, please use a legible font and minimum size of 11 or 12 points so that we may easily read your handout.
For in-person meetings, please provide written handouts of what you read to other members of the group. The handouts help the rest of us pay closer attention to what you’re reading, as well as make notes on the handouts. After you read, we will return the handouts to you. The size of the group varies from meeting to meeting. Ten handouts is a safe bet for most meetings.