Tuesday, February 13, 2007

No disgruntled poets, please!

Tonight I am going to meet a group of 'Montreal Writers.' I found this group via meetups.com in my never-ending quest to find critique partners who are not my friends or family. We'll see how this goes. My last foray into critique groups resulted in me quitting due to the less-than-useful suggestions from the over-abundance of self-proclaimed unappreciated, misunderstood poets in the group.

So far, tonight's group has two strikes against it:
one - the host is charging $10 per person. For what? Wine and hors d'oevres. Great. Apparently we need to be liquored up to read each other's work
two - writers tend to not be particularly social, which means we'll all stand around feeling uncomfortable wishing we were at home, alone, reading.

However, I'm going. I will do my best to conjure up 'outgoing Karen' and see how it goes. I promise to not rip the head off the first disgruntled poet who sneers at my commercial women's fiction, but if there is more than one in the group I won't be held responsible for my actions.

Coming soon: winter camping 07 pictures. I need to finish some freelance work before monkeying around with flickr but I should have time tomorrow.

3 comments:

Dodi said...

So how was it? Were they critiquing in iambic pentameter? Misunderstood in Hiaku?

Did you eat $10 worth of cheese and crackers?

Karen said...

They were too literary for me (again), but there was one guy who writes flash fiction and described himself as more "Mickey Spillane" He gave me a link to another online community that he uses and likes so I might try it...

Dodi said...

Is the literary croud anti-commercial? Isn't good writing good no matter the genre? And bad is bad?

I thought it was mainly the publishers and retail industry that focused on the labels. Do they consider themselves too good for chic lit? Or are the genres really just different?