Minutes of the
Second Meeting of the
Folklore and Creative Writing Section of AFS
American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in
Peggy Yocom convened the meeting.
Peggy circulated an
attendance sheet with e-mail addresses, and she’ll add those who would like to
the FOLKWRITERS listserve she manages at
Minutes
from the last meeting.
Peggy distributed the minutes
and corrected one item: People can belong to any AFS section without being a
member of AFS.
.
Our section meeting started
once again with readings. Laurel Horton read from her non-fiction project “My
life as a quilt.”
Announcements:
•
Sue Eleuterio urged people to come to the session with
novelist Mahmoud Saeed
•
Faye McMahon, Acquisitions Editor for Voices:
Journal of New York Folklore hopes to establish a column for creative
writing. Short pieces: 1000-4000 words is the usual
length. Photo essays, also. Urges people to submit. She’s open to different
forms, especially non-fiction and poetry. Rolling deadlines. She encourages
writers to send a draft and ask if it’s what Voices wants. Faye reminds
us that Steve Zeitlin writes a regular column for Voices.
Activities. We
discussed the activities we’d like:
– More
writing workshops. Let’s try one small focused workshop during AFS; maybe even
two. Sessions before and after AFS are difficult for some
because of the additional expense of an additional night, etc.
– Hold
a forum on where to publish our creative writings. Steve and Faye volunteer.
(After the meeting, they ask to be relieved of this task).
– Put a
bibliography of our creative writing on our website. Peggy volunteers to send
out request to the listserve; will try to do this in coming year.
– Put
an annotated list of readings, something like “Folklorists recommend Writer X’s
Novel Novel because . . .”
Peggy volunteers to canvass the listserve; will try to do this in
coming year.
Have
an official members list?
Most attenders agreed. Such a list
would encourage people to stay active, facilitate sending timely news to
everyone.
Dues?
We discussed what we could do if we
assessed dues: a book exhibit, a prize, travel money
for graduate students, money to defray cost of writing workshop.
Tim Lloyd recommends that sections
establish dues only when they have a clear purpose for the money.
– Bill
McCarthy read two poems: “The Birthday Horse” and “Papageno Wampanoag”
– Jo
Radner read a poem: “My Great-Great-Grand Uncle’s Bone-handled Jackknife”