The First Coffee: Nottingham Writers Collective’s First Meet-Up

Tonight saw the first meeting of the Nottingham Writers Collective, tucked away at a corner table in Caffè Nero on King Street.

Every group starts off small, and this one is no exception. One other writer turned up, but two were enough to start the conversation and share experiences of writing.

Peter Carter, originally from Yorkshire but living in Nottingham for over twenty years, joined me for a coffee and a muffin as he told me how the Felix the Cat cartoons inspired him to read and write as a child, and his years in technical college gave him the unexpected opportunity to develop his creative writing skills. Peter also noted how blogging felt like a style of writing that he was well suited to, as it inevitably is based on telling a story.

I got to share my own history as a writer, also. I’ve spent many years between blogging, writing poetry, and short stories, too. My first experience as a published writer came from an Irish-language newspaper’s call for short stories. My story was published shortly after my fifteenth birthday, and I was given a small fee for it — sixty euro. Since then, I’ve been published in Irish multiple times, although I still have to challenge myself to get something in English published.

The common experience felt tonight was that “life gets in the way” of our intentions to write more, but if one can look at it in another way, our lives also inspire us. Peter’s life experiences are no doubt a source for wonderful writing, much as my own can be used to write more. Getting the time to write may be difficult, but everyone certainly has a story to tell.

The next meeting, on that note, should be about how we choose to tell that story. Hopefully you can join us next month.