Stanza Mar Menor

STANZA MAR MENOR met this morning in San Miguel where our discussions were wide ranging, supportive, but also concentrated on our writing.
David brought along his seventh episode of Tonka And The Naughty Domovoi. This reflects back to his previous visits to Russia and the inspiration he gained there. The story is told in four line rhyming stanzas and revolves around a birthday party for Nan Tanya. What could go wrong there?
It is part of a wonderful set of children's stories that he hopes to publish with illustrations. He read it over and with some minor suggestions it sounded very good.
He still has three more episodes to go to complete it, but he is also working on a project involving immigrants - maybe boat people - and their treatment. After all poetry is about protest - is it not?
We will look forward to the pleasure (or discomfort) at reading his views. All poetic of course.

Margaret then reminded me of something that had disappeared from my mind. I later searched and found the references to the Neil Miller Gunn competition which introduces three lines taken from his writing and are listed as themes. Closing date for this is 2nd March 2015.

They are:

For love is the creator and cruelty is that which destroys

The secret loveliness and laughter in things

The extra magic of distance

However Margaret produce her first draft of Love and Cruelty based on the first of the above themes. For me, apart from the odd tweak, it is truly great, but she will take it away and review it. Some, in fact many, of the lines contain some wonderful wordage and invoke images that won't go away. Dark and powerful.

I will now have to do something on the above themes.

There is also the theme of Nature for the competition for RSPB and RIALTO.

There is other work going on and Denia Writers Circle Short Story Competition is on the following five themes:

When time goes back. Disguise

On the brink. The Return. Searching.

The deadline for this is 29th December.

I know that we are a poetry stanza, but we can still use other ideas and write accordingly.

We briefly talked about the winners at Ledbury, but there was little enthusiasm for it. It was felt that some of the work was 'fragmented' and that the best example of metre was with the junior winner. Perhaps we are on a different planet!

Our next meeting is on THURSDAY 20th November as that is when we can meet without conflicting with other commitments.