This volume, Tales From The Island , is an anthology of work produced by the members of the Sydney Seniors’ Writing Circle. A few of these selections were previously included in other publications, but most were written since October, 2006 and are published here for the first time.
The members of the Sydney Seniors’ Writing Circle: Kenneth Beaton, Jack Compton, Paula Hines, Judy Kaiser, Malcolm MacIver, Maureen MacIntosh, Rowe Rudderham and me – Kathy MacCuish – have one important thing in common. We all like words and we just love to use them to tell stories. We came together over the course of fall /winter 2006 – 07 as a result of a project sponsored by the Adult Learning Association of Cape Breton County (ALACBC) with funding provided by the Nova Scotia Senior Citizens Secretariat and the Adult Education Division of the Nova Scotia Department of Education. We would like to offer them our sincere thanks for the opportunity to come together and write.
Each Monday afternoon, beginning on October 16, 2006, we met from 2 – 4 PM in one of ALACBC’s classrooms on the second floor of the Southend Community Centre on Hillview Avenue in Sydney. Every session included writing and sharing of things that we had written. We always started with “freewriting” – a 10 to 15 minute time in which we freely wrote on an assigned topic – and then we shared what we had written by reading it aloud to the others. This activity always prompted lots of discussion and often generated ideas for other writing sessions. We made time to share things we had written at home, we sometimes reviewed points of grammar and punctuation and we worked on expanding our vocabularies. And we laughed and laughed and laughed some more. Those Monday afternoons were wonderful times. I must thank Ken, Jack, Paula, Judy, Malcolm, Maureen, Rowe, and Bill Hall (who was with us for the fall only) for their great patience and cooperation. They are a special group and talented storytellers, to boot.
I believe that our enjoyment of the sessions owes a lot to our varying backgrounds and life experiences. We are all now retired (or, at least semi-retired) and so are enjoying the luxury of being able to make time for an activity we may have ignored when we were busier. Among us, we worked in the insurance industry, for government, in transportation, education, in service industries and as homemakers. Our educational backgrounds range from less than high school completion to master’s degrees. Our family backgrounds are also widely varied.
I would like to take this opportunity to recognize Deborah Morgan, developer of the “Writing Out Loud” approach to adult writing. A number of years ago, I completed an online program of certification as a “Writing Out Loud Instructor” and found that this Seniors’ Writing Circle was the perfect opportunity to put many of the things I learned from Deborah and her philosophy into practice.