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

Meetings are held at the:
Albert Brenner Glickman Family Library
5th Floor, "Group Study Room"
314 Forest Avenue, Portland, ME 04101-2010

Upcoming Meetings

Peter is serving as the primary moderator.
Kimmy Sophia will be attending some of the meetings.

Meetings are from 6:00pm - 8:45pm

Upcoming Meetings:

- Wed, February 22nd

Additional meetings will be announced later.

Confirming Attendance

Please Call or Email to Confirm. To meet, we need at least 4 attendees total, so please check in and confirm first before attending. If we don’t have enough confirmations, or if the weather is bad, the meeting will be postponed. The meeting space is also limited, so attendance requires a reservation. See Moderator Contact Info above.

Meeting Details

Free Parking

The parking lot of the Glickman Library is behind the building (the "L" in the map below). The entrance is also in the back, from the parking lot.

There are a few meters in the parking lot, that require money until 7pm. The spaces that don't have meters are reserved for faculty, so if you use them, you may get a ticket.

We recommend two parking methods. Either find a spot on the street (there are a number of spaces on Durham St, just across Bedford Street), or use the parking garage, which is free after 6pm (you'll have to take an entrance ticket, but the exit gates are open after 6pm). To enter the garage (marked with a "P"), drive up Bedford St from Forest Ave, and take a left on Surrenden St. The entrance is a few yards on the left.

Drive through the garage and follow the signs for the garage exit, which is one floor down, on the ground floor as the exit faces the parking lot. If you park next to the exit, you can walk across the parking lot to the library's back entrance, which isn't as far as it looks.

Directions

Note: if you're driving via 295, make sure that you get off on the Forest Ave exit going away from downtown; otherwise you'll have to circle around Deering Oaks to come back in the right direction. I believe that the west exit is 6B.

Google Map Link

Meeting Location in the Library

Take the elevator to the 5th floor, and after getting out of the elevator, take a left toward the book stacks. When you reach the stacks, take a right, and you'll see the "Group Study Room".

Refreshments

Please feel free to bring refreshments, or a cup of coffee, etc. There are also some vending machines near the meeting room.

Meeting Schedule

Meetings are held twice monthly, usually on Wednesdays, from 6pm to 9pm.

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.

Confirming Attendance

Just to Highlight this One More Time: Please Call or Email to Confirm. To meet, we need at least 4 attendees total, so please check in and confirm first before attending. If we don’t have enough confirmations, or if the weather is bad, the meeting will be postponed. The meeting space is also limited, so attendance requires a reservation.

Maximum Attendees

The Glickman room holds around 14 people or so. At our first meeting we had 10 attendees, and with 2 1/2 hours to meet, each person was able to read for around 10 minutes, followed by around 5 minutes of discussion. We are happy to have more people attend, but after 10 people, additional people may not be able to read, depending on time.

Some people also can't always attend, so we're happy to consider new people. Contact us for more info.

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.

You’re invited!

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 belong 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. (We're still attending our Cornish group.)

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 meeting for December to the Albert Brenner Glickman Family Library. We will continue to meet there after December. 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.

~

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 :-).