On a lighter note -- our LOL Group

For about a year and  a half I've met with an informal group of women who write to a topic that is  chosen in a somewhat spontaneous way. Last meeting one of our members had just started reading a new book called The Monopolist which is about how the game Monopoly got started.  She reports that it is a fascinating book and the game was originally meant to be an anti-capitalist game, although it has evolved differently. So we decided our topic for this week would be  "games".  We left it  wide open to interpretation.

I should mention that we were nameless for some time but eventually became the LOL group, variously Laughing Out Loud, Literary Old Ladies and Ladies Of Laughter.  We do laugh a great deal, some of the writing is very funny and often our conversations are full of laughter for one reason or another. Some gatherings leave me feeling absolutely buoyant, as if I've been given a big whiff of laughing gas -- today was one.  Just about every game children play, most adult card games as well as most board games, were mentioned mostly glancingly but some in depth.  One woman was a child who mostly made up her own games (although she mentioned the infamous "doctor" game that most of us played as children).  It was a wonderfully rich topic, one that I think I will use for my writing class since almost every one has memories of childhood and may still be serious game players -- one woman plays three games of backgammon with her husband every day, others of us wrote of games we enjoy. Since most of us are fairly literary minded we were an unatheletic group.  Again and again we reminded one another of games we had forgotten.  And opinions, past incidents, quarrels about games and likes and dislikes ... nobody was neutral about games. The little hopscotch girl is in the illustration because, with mu mind awhirl in memories, I realize we didn't mention hopscotch or jump rope .. and probably many. many more.

I know of book groups and I know of writers' group where people try to help one another write better.  In fact one woman today voiced a desire to feed back about her "boring" piece -- the feed back in this case was that it was not boring at all, she was just self-conscious because it was longer than she usually writes.