A Writers’ Group Feast

My writers’ group had a cooler-than-usual meeting last month.

Writers’ groups are generally pretty cool. We don’t always sit around in black berets and drink coffee or wine and comment on existential truths in literature; that’s for special occasions only. Usually we have a few snacks and critique each other’s submissions. But this session was a special occasion of another kind; we had a fiction pitch-in.

Or at least that’s what I’m calling it. We were all to bring our usual ten pages, submitted in advance so we could all read and critique, but also a dish or dishes from our written world.

As my group is nicely cross-genre, this made for some fun contributions.

Garrett writes World War 2 thrillers set largely in Paris, so he brought a Bohemian supper of wine, bread, and Brie.

Stephanie is polishing a middle grade adventure about a multicultural family on a reality show, and so she made a ratatouille.

The other Stephanie writes second-world fantasy, and so she made an our-world version of spice bread and brought wine, a fantasy staple.

Jim‘s protagonist is acting as an exterminator on a planet overrun with rodents, so he brought some fried “runiga” to share, in a specially-updated container.

The other Jim also writes sci-fi, and he brought a fun specimen of one of his alien species, a sentient and mobile plant which had rooted itself in Oreo crumb dirt.

Peggy wasn’t able to join us, which was sad because I wanted to know what teens eat in post-deluge globally-warmed America. Probably something grown hydroponically…. Nor could Marcia make it, and since her current story involves trolls in backwoods Kentucky, that could have been quite a fun dish!

And I brought food from two sources. My group had helped with Con Job, so I brought colorful Japanese snacks as typical J-con fare. But this month’s pages were from a short story set in Spain, so I brought paella and gachas as well.

 

It was a lot of fun, and I hope we can do it again!