Meeting on 14 January 2020

Oh, my friends! What should we discuss at our next meeting, which will take place on Tuesday, 14 January 2020, at 7:00 p.m. in the Carl-Schurz-Haus library?

I have been having trouble reading lately: starting but not finishing books, not knowing what to read next, horrors of that nature. Perhaps we could talk about reading.

I have been thinking about the number of different lives I’ve led in this life so far. I made a list and came up with 14 distinct lives. Maybe it’s more. Maybe it’s less. It is a question of where you draw the line. Perhaps we could talk about the magnitude of transitions.

Furthermore, the world is coming to an end, and it seems, more and more, as though there is little any of us can do about it. Perhaps we could spend some time comforting one another.

I look forward to seeing you soon.

Winter Reading

One week from today, on 10 December 2019, the Freiburg Writers’ Group will have its annual Winter Reading! It will take place, as usual, in the Carl-Schurz-Haus Library and begin at 19:00.

We invite you to bring your friends, some kind of Christmas snack to share, and something to read.

The Winter Reading is one of my favorite events of the year. I love that it takes place in our very gemütlich clubhouse, the library. I love the mood. I love the snacks. And I always love hearing what you’ve been working on! I’m pretty much a Christmas cynic, but the Winter Reading always helps me find a little of that Christmas Spirit!

So: Come one, come all!

Release Party for List–The Freiburg Review!

This Friday, 25. October at 20:00 in Unicorn Music, is the Release for Volume VI of List–The Freiburg Review, a local German-English literary magazine, in which two regular members of the Freiburg Writers’ Group have been published.

Come to Belfortstraße 31 to hear readings from the publication, sip on a beverage of your choice, and enjoy some casual company!

LISTnewflyer

Goodness Gracious

Like every month, our next meeting has kind of sneaked up on me! That meeting will be on Tuesday, 08 October 2019 at 7:00 p.m. in the Carl-Schurz-Haus Library and will be structured, more likely than not, in the same way our meetings are usually structured: We will begin with a writing prompt; we will write for 20 or so minutes with that prompt in mind; we will then discuss the prompt itself, our reactions to it (both internally and on paper), and maybe someone will feel like sharing. There will then be time to talk about any other writerly concerns you may have.

As always, everyone is welcome, regardless of mother tongue, age, gender, linguistic acumen, etc. We aim to provide a safe space for writing and writers.

 

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about:

I have been reading Lucy Ellmann’s latest book, Ducks, Newburyport, the 1000-page, inner-monologue of a middle-aged woman from Ohio. Because that monologue is “stream of consciousness,” the novel isn’t divided into neat sentences, but rather uses the sentence fragment as well as a great deal of word association to get where it’s going. I am enjoying it very much.

I purchased the book without any previous knowledge of it. Simply found it on a shelf and thought, I’ll buy that. Since I started reading, I’ve done a little research on it and found that the Kirkus Reviews review called it, “Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space.”

Now, I know that Kirkus reviews contain no byline, which means that any two reviews could be by any two different people; however, every publication of its nature will have (or should have) an editorial vision, and hopefully a coherent one.

So I decided to look up the Kirkus review for the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgard‘s magnum opus My Struggle, a nearly 3,500 page examination of the minutiae in Knausgard’s own life. And I find it tremendously interesting that the Kirkus review for that book, a starred review by the way, ends with this sentence: “A fittingly bulky end to a radical feat of oversharing.”