Welcome, new members Nan (Haven't-I-seen-you-someplace-before?) Lundeen and Carolyn Rice who learned about our Greenville Group at a conference in Columbia. Nan and Carolyn added thoughtful comments to our critique session. We look forward to having them share their writing with us. Leland Beaudrot gets the prize for best rejection letter. How many of us have received one of these with real writing on it: "We'd like to see something else...nice work." Hey, that's almost as good as an acceptance. (We writers are suckers for even the tiniest encouragement.)

Our next meeting will be June 6th, 6:00 at The Open Book. Last chance to Spring into action before Summer arrives!

"Overview of Painting the Corners: a Poet's Look at the 2002 Season," as presented by Gene Fehler is another example of Gene's talents. He denied to the two newcomers that he writes a lot about baseball. In presenting the proposal he sent to a publisher, he told us he had written 76, that's seventy six, poems since the opening day of the baseball season, about a month ago. (Not being the baseball expert Gene is, I don't know the exact date.)

His book, "A Daily Journal (in the form of free verse poems) Chronicling the 2002 Baseball Season," will contain c. 450 poems--c. 70,000 words. He will chronicle key moments daily and write a poem about the days' significant event(s).

It is geared toward "Baseball Fans who Follow the Game Closely." It sounds like an amazing book to propose when Gene thinks he will probably be rejected. He says he will do it anyway. Gene is such a great example for us who are struggling to get ANYTHING published. Reading the resume of his works on the reverse page overwhelms me and I am honored to have Gene attend our meetings and listen to our work!

Some night when we have as few readers as at the last meeting, maybe we should give Leland Beaudrot extra time to read more than five pages of "Amused." It seems like we've been roaming around the Governor's School for an awfully long time. Now that a new female character, Erin, has been introduced, we are anxious to see if she and Mikey end up together. We also wonder if the appealing old security guard, Mr. Jennings, will have a prominent role as the story unfolds. Sue Renault had high praise for the dialog during his conversation with Mikey about girls. During critiquing, several questions were posed. Leland always had a clear vision of the background points to answer these, but most of this information needs to be woven into the story to avoid possible reader confusion.

Sue Renault treated us to both a poem and three pages from Elecphonse. (You know, he's been around for a long time, too) We liked the poem, "About My Father," but Gene and Randy suggested a title change. As another example of Sue's great talent, there was little to critique. We've always loved Elecphonse, especially all those wonderful made-up words. Unlike one earlier meeting when we banged up Sue pretty hard, the comments were mostly favorable this time. Gene praised the story's great energy, and Pat liked several of Sue's phrases, such as "neat as a school fire drill."

John Kingsbury has read the Mother's Manual. He knows every question on a mom's heart, mind, and tongue. "What's she like? Where does she go to church? Where did you meet her?" Busy though she is at cranking out her cookies, she doesn't miss a beat. Speaking of beats, though, we agreed that John uses too many in this scene. Rather than connecting us to the action, they distracted us--an unusual distraction in John's writing. He is usually the Master of the Beats. We also agree that Dying With Amanda is moving along nicely. We're involved with young Johnny's experiences; we like the Harmony vignettes (for example, the locked library drawers for such titillating authors as Mark Twain); the dialog is crisp; and we're interested in what happens next. Nice work, John.

Pat Stewart's husband Jack retired, and Pat was worried--worried that he'd spend so much time on the computer that she wouldn't be able to get on. Well, she can relax. Jack bought himself a new computer, but doesn't have time to use it, because he also bought a concrete mixer. When you're slowly paving your entire property, who has time for email? Or time to alphabetize your wife's spices, for that matter? Pat kept us in stitches with "Retirement Addiction," and about the only suggestions were that it needed a stronger title and some more detail about Jack's failure to develop "six-pack abs".

Phil Arnold is on a poetry kick, and strangely enough, all of his poems are about Elvis. Go figure. Phil even took the time to look up the specifications for a limerick on the Internet, and brought in technically correct (and, of course, clever and funny) limericks. And in keeping with Blue Christmas and Blue Hawaii, he even read a blue limerick (what rhymes with hyenas?). He threw in an Elvis Haiku, too. Phil says Der Tubemeister inspired him to write the Haiku. Well, Phil, you've inspired D.T. too, and he dedicates this limerick to you:

There was a bad boy named Osama
Who paraded around in pajamas
But when George bombed his cave
There was nothing to save
And he cried his way home to his Mama

We write for the same reason we dream--because we cannot not dream, because it is the nature of the human imagination to dream. Those of us who "write," who occasionally arrange and rearrange reality for the purposes of exploring its hidden meanings, are more serious dreamers, perhaps we are addicted to dreaming, but never because we fear or despise reality. As Flannery O'Conner said (in the excellent book of her posthumously-collected essays Mystery and Manners) writing is not an escape from reality, "it is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." She insists that the writer is a person who has hope in the world; people without hope do not write.

[Writer's Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing; Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1970.]

Printed Matters is the newsletter of the Greenville Chapter, SCWW, which meets on the first Thursday of each month at 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book, 110 S Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC.

Thanks to our contributing writers and news reporters: Pat Stewart, Phil Arnold, Sue Renault and Steve Heckman.

Copyright 2002 by Leland Beaudrot, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.