My writing group started out of a few of us from the Literary Fiction Writers Program at UW that I completed in the spring of 2004. One of the people in the class arranged for any interested individuals to meet at Third Place Books in Lake City on a Saturday and see if we wanted to form a writing group. A small group of folks came to that first meeting, and we arranged to meet on Saturday mornings at the Third Place Books in Ravenna.

Since that time, membership in the group has dwindled some, but we've also picked up one new member who'd been participating in another group that went defunct.

We meet every third Saturday.

Mary is the most manic of us, I think. She has twice completed the NaNoWriMo event, and I suspect she'll do it again this November. Now she's working on an interesting project, a collection of stories with overlapping characters centered on an old countryside hotel.

Lisa is the most recent addition to the group. She has been working on a wonderful short story about a recent widow and her teenage son who go on a hiking trip to Mt. Rainier to relive memories of a similar trip they took years earlier with the dead husband.

Gary has traveled widely and had such a broad range of experiences that he brings to bear in his stories. He wrote a story about a pickpocket in Lima, Peru, and his most recent story is about two cousins who meet with grave danger from poachers while on a camping/research trip in a remote area of Idaho. He describes the area with such specific familiarity, just as Lisa does in her story about Mt. Rainier.

As for me, the novel I'm working on has been languishing lately. Maybe I should entere NaNoWriMo just to get a first draft finished.

The fifth member of our group, Jim, was working on a fascinating historical novel set in England during the tail end of the Roman era. It was called Britannis, which was the name of the main character, a captain in the Roman army guarding Hadrian's Wall and watching the world as he knew it crumble. We were all eager to learn what would happen to Britannis and the other characters in his world, but we will never find out. Jim died suddenly a few weeks ago.

We got an email from Jim's wife last weekend, the day after our last meeting. She was able to log into Jim's email and reply to our messages. Jim had told us that he wouldn't be able to be at our October 1st meeting, but we all thought we'd be seeing him on the 22nd.

I'm so sad that Jim is gone. He added so much to our little group, and I'm not exactly sure how to describe the quality of his involvement. It's not that he was particularly insightful with his critiques, and he often didn't get our suggestions for his own writing. He struggled with the whole concept of story goal, and as much as we all loved Britannis, there were long stretches of the story where the guy simply went from adventure to adventure without raising the overall dramatic tension. But I admired his understanding of the history of the period he was writing about, and he wrote about it with such amazing attention to detail.

I loved the way Jim laughed. You could tell that Jim relished life and did everything with the same enthusiasm he brought to our group. And that is the thing I'll miss, and I don't think our group will ever be the same. Jim added passion and excitement to our experience of writing and sharing our work with each other. I hope some of that has rubbed off on the rest of us.