TOWN SQUARE WRITERS GROUP GOES VIRTUAL
“You beat the bushes and writers come out,” said Betty Lucke, one of the founders of the Town Square Writers Group. “There are a lot of them in Vacaville.”
But now that group, which launched in 2011, is finding other ways to continue during COVID, as it can no longer meet in person. The original group, which met in Town Square Library, has grown and morphed into several writing groups that are continuing to be productive during the shelter in place order.
The group as a whole has published more than 40 books since its inception.
Kelly Hess of Vacaville has published seven novels for young adults and is finishing up the first draft of his eighth book. He specializes in fantasy and science fiction, which he came to love as a teenager, reading books by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkein, David Eddings, Orson Scott Card and Piers Anthony.
“I’m just trying to bring an appreciation and a love of reading and story,” he said. “I can remember as a teenager finding
these fantasy books or science fiction books and I was just fascinated. I couldn’t stop reading them. It was the first time I was reading for my own enjoyment. And that’s kind of what I would like to inspire in young people.”
“I got intrigued by writing mysteries and now I’m on my fifth one,” said Lucke, who has served as co-coordinator of the writing groups along with Deni Harding. Her mystery books go under the heading of the Circle Sleuth Mysteries, a few of which feature a photo of her Welsh terrier on the cover.
Lucke and her husband owned and operated the Otter Nature Store in downtown Vacaville from 1990 to 2008. She served on the Board of Directors of the Downtown Vacaville Business Association and then helped with event planning for the Downtown Vacaville Business Improvement District, established in 1999. She worked on the Middle Earth Festival, which later turned into the Medieval Fantasy Festival.
Lucke could not find a good resource book on writing for communitybased events that used volunteers. So she decided to write her own book to help other communities, the “Festival Planning Guide: Creating Community Events with Big Hearts and Small Budgets.”
“I got mostly done with the book and realized I had absolutely no idea how to get the thing published,” recalled Lucke. “And so in 2011 with the help of one of the Town Square librarians, Kevin Tolley, Deni Harding and I met with a traditional publisher, Kevin and some other people who we pulled together in the library. And that group became what we now call the Town Square Writers. We’ve been meeting ever since.”
At first the group met monthly, sometimes twice a month, then weekly.
“In the very beginning, we used to fit in one of the study rooms in the library so we would get maybe eight people at a time,” said Lucke. “But it kept growing.”
Before COVID hit, the group was drawing 15-25 people every Tuesday afternoon in the library. A couple of years ago Lucke started a Fiction Writers Coffee Klatch that meets on Monday mornings. She also launched a Thursday evening group.
“We discovered there was a need for people who worked during the day yet still wanted a writing group,” she said. “So once a month at the Cultural Center Library we had a Thursday evening writing group.”
There were also two spinoffs, smaller groups for brainstorming story ideas, one of them for fantasy writers, the other comprised of two mystery writers and a historical fiction writer. In addition, there is a children’s book group that focuses on both writing and illustration.
The format for the biggest group, the Tuesday gathering, was reading and response. Lucke would solicit selections of 1,500 words from five writers and email them to the group prior to the meeting. The writers would read their selections at the meeting and get feedback on things like plot, structure, characterization and pacing from the group during the two-hour sessions.
If an author completed a book, Lucke would send the book out to members a month in advance and then devote an entire two-hour session to feedback.
“It’s kind of nice,” said Hess. “It’s an invaluable resource as far as editing and catching little errors and getting readers’ opinions.”
“You got to see the whole thing,” echoed Lucke. “You got to see how the plot worked, how the pacing worked, how the characterization worked and it was immensely helpful.”
When the group did not do reading and response, it had topic-based sessions on a particular genre, like memoir, mystery or fantasy. The writers would discuss setting, character development, point of view and the craft of writing as well as marketing and publishing.
The youngest writer in the group graduated from high school this spring, while the oldest is around 85.
When COVID shut down in-person meetings in midMarch, four of the groups shifted to Zoom.
“I haven’t seen anybody in person since March,” said Hess. “It starts off kind of rocky because nobody knows exactly how we are doing anything. But we would just kind of chime in and pose questions and what we’re doing personally on our writing and how things are going and if anybody has any recommendations or suggestions on how to improve.”
“Every Monday we have ten people who Zoom together,” said Lucke. “It used to be that we would just talk about the particular challenges that we were experiencing at the time in our writing, We still do that and Lord knows there are a lot of challenges now. But we’ve gotten more into the reading and response because that’s not available in our big group at the library anymore.”
A few writers who moved away are now able to join the group via Zoom. One is a college student in Alabama. When shelterin-place regulations end, Lucke anticipates a hybrid approach — some in-person gatherings, some on Zoom.
Writing has been a challenge for individual writers during COVID.
“You would think that because we are stuck at home and have time that we would be a lot more productive in our writing,” said Lucke. “That has not turned out to be true. The whole COVID thing, it’s a distraction. Some days it’s just downright depressing… We’re isolated and this is one thing that keeps us in communication with each other and at least you’re face to face with everyone. You might not be in the same room, but it’s been very helpful and very supporting and that’s been important.”
“It’s been a lot different,” said Hess, who tries to write something every day. “I would have thought with all the free time and lots of time at home I would have a lot more writing done, but it’s kind of been the opposite. With everything going on, it has kind of killed the motivation. Even though I have more time to do it, I think I’m doing less of it… It’s just constant procrastination.”
Lucke expects that more people are reading during COVID. But it’s harder to get the authors’ books to them.
“We’re definitely challenged by marketing in this day and age,” she said. “We used to go to a lot of things together like craft fairs, traveling to bookstores and so now we can’t do that. Or working with Bounty Books (Vacaville) or Copperfield’s (Napa) to do an event. That’s kind of gone by the wayside. We used to do a fall writers’ boot camp kind of thing. Well, you can’t do that right now.”
Lucke, who holds Master of Religious Education and Master of Divinity degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary, has served as an assistant pastor in central Pennsylvania and Sacramento.
“Just because I’m not in a formal ministry in a church setting doesn’t mean that I don’t feel what I’m doing now is not a ministry,” she said. “Because this group is a way of ministering to a number of people to help them grow. They help me grow too. It’s a two-way street.”
For more information on the writers’ groups, email Betty Lucke at bylucke@ aol.com.