Extended Family

Extended Family.

Back in February last year, I wrote a blog post about the ‘family’ of authors.

Apart from bikers, I have never known such a diverse group of people giving so much support to fellow members. Whatever the level of your writing, from ‘newbie’ to published, someone will always be on hand to give encouragement and support.

Monday night was the first monthly meeting of 2017, for the Bahrain Writers’ Circle. This is the time we pay our annual subscriptions and discuss ideas and events for the forthcoming year.

We had several new members signing on, and I hope they were encouraged by the positive attitude that comes from the BWC members. They are most certainly an extended family, headed by our very capable matriarch, Rohini Sunderam (she’ll kill me for that, I’m sure.)

As is nearly always the case, the meeting slid into a general discussion about a variety of topics, mostly about writing but some not, and this seems to be what happens when this group of writers gets together, and is certainly my experience with other writers online.

I am not sure what the reason is; perhaps us ‘arty’ types, (less arty than myself I cannot imagine) are prone to talking about anything that comes to mind, or maybe this is what happens when a group of individuals with a common interest get together. Our discussions in the BWC can be lively, but never become acrimonious; we can agree to disagree; one of us must get in the last word of course! We are writers, after all.

We come from all walks of life, have varied interests outside the written word, different cultures, religions, jobs, ideals and principles, yet we respect others may not agree with our own thoughts and may have different ideas about the world.

Speaking of the world, perhaps it would be a better place if writers replaced the politicians, and the politicians went out into the real world for once.

We couldn’t do any worse…could we?