Saturday, August 2, 2008

Writers' Haven

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer, despite the high gas and food prices, and that you have been able to get away somewhere. In any case, most of us will be "getting away" to DC next month for the Global Peace Festival.We had a great meeting last week at the Saunders' house. Present were both Alan and June Saunders, Kerry Pobanz, Richard Panzer, Dan Sladich, Bob Beebe and newcomer Carla Mahnken, who came with her recently published book on raising small children. We began with a discussion about Carla's book, which contends that for children to grow properly and keeping their creativity intact, they need plenty of positive reenforcement. Unfortunately, in our fallen world, parents or caregivers are prone to squash a young child's natural creativity and curiosity, making then overly sensitive to making mistakes. As such, their full potential as human beings is never able to develop.From that discussion, we moved on to Dan Sladich, who presented several of his poems that will be included in our upcoming anthology. These mostly-short poems explored the realms of human and divine love, the attraction of opposites, rejecting temptation, physical and spiritual love, purity, filial piety, empathy, patience, and many other topics weaved in among his seven poems. We had a good time trying to understand the meaning, both hidden and obvious, in these poems.Our next meeting will be held at the Sladich's this Sunday, July 27, 3:00-5:00. We will be discussing Kerry Pobanz's second submission to the anthology, "You Are the Same Person After Death", perhaps contrasting it with his other one, "We Are Destined to Become Different Creatures." Both are attached here. Also, we will discuss Jerry Chesnut's piece, "A Simple Life," which I sent out to you last time. I hope to finalize our anthology contributions. Everyone, except for two, has made at least one submission. We also received a short essay from Kate Tsubata entitled "What Marriage Has Meant in My Life." I hope we can get full participation in this first project of our group.Everyone seemed to be happy with June's suggested name for our group, "Writers' Haven", so we plan to go with that as our official name from now.