Notice
Orange Coast Writers

Have you written a book? Or a poem? Maybe you’d like to join us? We’re a group of writers, some of us published, who can help you find your inner voice.

We meet the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month. 1pm-3pm. All writers welcome.

Fuck ya, I thought to myself. I’ve written a book or two and it would be handy to find some like-minded people to bounce ideas off of. It’ll be a groovy communal thing, I’m there!

The second Tuesday of the month, between one and three in the afternoon, I walk into my local library, the one where my wife found the printed notice. I seriously doubted that I would find my inner voice there but figured if I became desperate to find something deep inside that, after the meeting, I could go into the kiddie library, sit on one of those toddler chairs and find my inner child.

The Orange Coast Writers meet in a large multi-purpose room just off the main library. I expected a bunch of people who would be conversing about various topics, maybe broken up into little pods like a mixer, yeah, a writers’ mixer. At about a quarter till two, I pulled open the door, throwing caution to the wind because meeting new people isn’t my thing and … well … that’s when I encountered the parallel universe.

There were maybe eight people in the room. They appeared to be reading quietly around a makeshift arrangement of tables. Now that I entered so boldly I couldn’t go back, so I plowed forward and took a seat at the table. Every eye was upon me and it wasn’t just a matter of curiosity, rather each eye was focused with the kind of stare you put on an uninvited intruder.

“Can we help you?”
“Ya, well, you see I have this flyer here and, well, I wanted to get some more information.”
“Well, we’re in the middle of a critique but we can talk to you in a moment … And the meeting started at one.”
I said, “Your little flyer says 1 to 3, if there were more stringent rules, you should have written a better flyer.”

This was going to be painful. Awkward and painful. Awkward and painful and pointless. Awkward and painful and pointless and demeaning. This so-called Orange Coast Writers gathering was identical to the dozens of gatherings that happen every day at the clubhouse in Leisure World. Identical. Of the eight people, six were women – just like at Leisure World, they had outlived their first husbands and now wanted to boss around different men. The two men and at least three of the women were in their eighties, two of the gals were maybe my age. There was one younger woman, but she refused to speak or make eye contact with me during my visit. She had the appearance and mannerisms of a woman who had just escaped after years of being held hostage in a Mormon encampment.

With the “critique” now over, the group turned back to me, “So, how can we help you?”
“Like I said, I saw your flyer and I wanted to see what it was all about; personally, it would be cool to meet some people who know more about being an author than I do.”
“Are you a writer?”
“I think I am. I’ve been employed as one for over thirty years. I wrote a book in 2016 and I just finished a memoir and I was hoping to find a group that could help me figure out what I should do next.”
“We should be clear that this is not a group that helps with marketing, we are a critique group.”

This last comment came from an angry old coot who, until that moment, had not looked up from whatever it was he was reading. I was fairly sure he was gonna call me a whippersnapper and it seemed evident that he didn’t want some outsider coming in with any new ideas or original thoughts.

I said, “You mean you guys bring in whatever it is your writing and then you spend four hours a month grading each other’s papers?”
“It’s a good way to improve as a writer,” they said.

I then knew that this was going to end badly. “That mean’s you’re really not a writer’s group, you’re a critique group, a room full of critics.” To which they replied, “Constructive criticism is a writer’s best friend.”

“I would never be so presumptuous as to a label myself a worthy critic of your work and frankly,” I said, “I’m not sure anyone in this room is qualified to critique mine.”
“Sir, we’ll have you know that we have published authors in this group.”

“And I can appreciate that,” I said, “It just seems like a suffocatingly narrow focus, more about pointing out flaws than celebrating possibilities.” They said, “Well, it seems to work for our group.”

Party on then I thought. Personally, if I’m gonna spend time with the Leisure World crowd there needs to be drinking involved. But I learned a couple of valuable lessons. First, if you decide to branch out in life, someone will surely kick you in the balls. Second, everyone needs a place to belong to, even if that place is a den of criticism void of any personality. And lastly, the best thing about the public library has always been the books that live there, not the people who go there.