Report on Writing Day

One of our newer members, Elspeth Munro, kindly wrote the following piece about the one-day writing course she recently attended.


I went along last Saturday to Kilmacolm Community Centre for the Creative Writing Workshop. There SHOULD have been eight of us, but only four turned up. It was, however, an interesting morning, with not just tea and coffee but SANDWICHES to fuel the Muse... I've written here what I can remember.

Kirstin Zhang was leading the workshop titled "Creative Communities". It was part of St Columba's school's outreach programme, with funds made available from the school.

Of the four of us taking part, one lady (Pat) has written several books for children about horse-riding. One lady was considering re-sitting her Higher English, and the other two of us are recent returners to writing. Kirstin herself is a prize-winning author with various projects on the go.

We started off with a game of Call My Bluff (but more like "Would I Lie To You"). We each had to write three sentences about ourselves, one true, two false. The others asked questions and we had to lie convincingly - very interesting seeing what rubbish we could make up and how genuine we could make it sound.

We then spent some time writing about People (we ran out of time for Places) with all of us having to write about someone we remembered from the past, someone who had some sort of influence over us or who triggered some interest etc.

We all enjoyed ourselves and managed to organise a second meeting on 19th May in Kilmacolm.

We also talked over the possibility of running a six-week evening course in September (probably) which would (again probably) cost about £45, and would be within St Columba's School. It's under investigation at the moment… If and when I hear more I'll let you know.

Elspeth