Letting My Hair Down (and other strange anomalies)

Having a creative outlet is as essential for me as...well, breathing!

In my younger days I pursued piano, flute, drama and ballet (does horseback riding count as a creative outlet?). Later on I took up singing and picked up again on ballet after a hiatus. During what my son and I call the "difficult days", writing became my one and only creative outlet. I poured myself into it as an incredibly cathartic experience.

When I was young I used to plink around with my parents' ancient typewriter (can't imagine doing that today), writing stories, poems, and even a mystery screenplay. Teachers would comment on my vivid writing style, but I never thought of writing as anything more than an assignment.

As an adult, by chance I took a short-term creative writing course offered through a local community college, and through that offering several of us decided to put together a critique group in order to share our writing and receive constructive criticism (key word - constructive). Though we've been through ebbs and flows over the last six years, we now have a small, tight-knit group that meets twice a month. I live for those second and fourth Thursdays.

Over the years, our little group has maintained pretty much the core of "oldies", our original membership created from the class. We all come from various backgrounds, are of varying ages, and we all even have different favorite genres and specialty areas of writing we like to pursue. A common genre isn't what keeps us together. I think it is actually the mutual desire to help pull the best from each other's natural abilities. We've developed a trust factor that even when we receive a difficult critique, we can know that it is meant as a help and not as a hindrance.

Of course, it also helps that we all let our hair down during our meetings (at least those of us who HAVE hair). Maybe that's why we've slowly been pushed toward the back of Border's music department where no one has to hear us (or at least see us). I suspect management has hired bodies to pretend they are other critique groups in order to take up all available space and encourage us to leave. Last night they even hired someone to pretend they were building shelving in the music department, revving up the drill and blocking out the sound of our voices. Heck, next time we might just have to meet in the storage closet!

I don't care where we meet, as long as I can continue to let my hair down twice a month. It's become essential to my well-being. It also keeps me breathing, you know.