Our little writing group which calls itself LOL (could be, of course, laughing out loud, could be ladies of literature, laughing old ladies) -- etc. met today. We usually talk more than we read our writing. Today very much in spades. The suggested prompt was "teen memories". One was the concidental meetings that lead to a marriage (one very shy girl, meets one very straight forward young man -- and they've been together for over 60 years!), another was an introduction to great theatre (a preview performance of Mary Martin as Peter Pan). But the coincidences that caused the most discussion was that a guest grew up in Johannesburg, So. Africa, and one of our regular members did too... and they were close enough in age to know many of the same people. So many stories!!
Writing groups, especially those largely made up of women of retirement age, often bring to light revelations that have been buried for many, many years. I've found this in the classes I've taught at the Academy for Lifelong Learning. A time comes when we realize that those stories of pathological shyness can be told, those stories of long correspondences with young men who were recruited and sent overseas to wars that seem ancient, stories of brothers and sisters, loving parents and difficult parents... that seem to have sunk deep into the murk of memory's bottom layers, come back, now, through the wisdom of a long life, they have taken on truths that were not possible sooner.
Writing, not for publication, not out of ambition, but for the sake of revelation and self-discovery, which remains possible even to people in their sixties and seventies ... yes, their eighties too --is cathartic, healing and deeply satisfying for both writer and audience. To allow that to happen is a large part of why I continue teaching these "telling stories" classes -- with all the ambivalence of that term -- true stories or untrue stories.
