Though I now live on Gumbaynggirr Country, on the Mid North Coast of NSW, I spent 23 years on Wadi Wadi Country, in the Illawarra. Secrets began there, as a 500-word exercise for a South Coast Writers Centre (SCWC) writing group. A few years later, that exercise was the inspiration for a couple of chapters I wrote in Claire Corbett’s Novel Writing class for the MA in Creative Writing at UTS, during which time I travelled between Sydney and Thirroul two nights a week until COVID confined us all to our homes and Zoom.
After graduation, I couldn’t let go of that developing story and, with the SCWC’s move to Coledale, I became part of the new Coledale Fiction Writers group, meeting mostly online to share and critique each other’s work.
Over the years, as a SCWC member, volunteer and Committee of Management member, I was welcomed into a broad South Coast writing community, which happily overlapped with my University of Wollongong community.
Through SCWC, I also connected with Aunty Barbara Nicholson and the Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) Writers, and for seven years I had the privilege of transcribing the words written by First Nations inmates at biannual creative writing workshops for the annual Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre anthologies.
I know I’ll see a lot of friendly faces in the audience at Ryan’s, including those from the wonderful Collins Thirroul Bookstore. And this reinforces for me the importance for new and emerging writers of belonging to a writing community. Writing communities teach us, nurture us and share with us in celebrating our successes. If you haven’t already done so, join your local or state writing centre, or a writing group, or all three. You won’t regret it. I’ve joined three new writing groups since I moved north.