Being alone in Maine after my younger daughter had moved away to Portland, I was looking for something to occupy my time other than going to work. I had received information from Senior College -- part of Univerity of Maine -- and noticed a summer course on memoir writing. I signed up.
The course itself was very sketchy being only five sessions and having about thirty enrollees. Everyone was to have a chance to present a short piece of writing for criticism from the class. My turn was near the end, and I wrote up some silly childhood adventure that would be amusing. It was not remarkable other than it was well-written.
It became obvious during the five weeks that some of the class members were more serious about their writing than others, and at the last class, a few of us got together and decided to continue on our own with a small writing group. One woman took the lead on arranging space for us to meet.
At this point, there were five or six of us in this group, and we met weekly at various places into the early fall. Soon, people began to drop out. The pressure to have something prepared was too much for their busy schedules of activities. We boiled down to a corp group with Ann, Norb, Jim and me. Ann was a retired teacher from New York City, Norb had experience as a teacher at New York University teaching documentary writing, Jim was retired air force and was intent on writing his story just for his family, and I wasn't quite sure yet what I wanted to do, but knew I wanted to publish whatever eventually developed.
It was during one of our sessions that I started talking about my family's experience a hundred years ago with eminent domain in Pittsburgh. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but would guess it was during a discussion with Norb about his writing which was about his handicapped childhood in that city. Norb turned to me and said, "That's the story you should write."
Jean, Somewhere in Maine
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