Join or create a Writers' Group/Workshop

There’s apparently an established writing group at the library now with members who come in and out and the group meets at different places every month, I think. The really bad part is the leader is a woman who teaches senior citizens at the local university and, because she is published, thinks that she, well, knows it all. In the last writing group in which I participated a few years ago, she pretty much vetoed most ideas that people wrote or put forth. I mean, a writing group should support and give constructive criticism and praise what works but she pretty much gave a definitive “yes” or “no” and then went on…she wasn’t even the leader of that group! Also, she liked virtually everything I didn’t and didn’t like just about anything that I thought was new and innovative and different and fresh.
Ugh.
So do I try to join this group and get something…anything out of it? and risk being annoyed and put down? Or do I just keep biding my time…?

Joining is probably more fun than starting, becuase writers are difficult people to organise and you can spend a considerable amout of time “being diplomatic”.

To the online writing group and I’ve been considering who I would like to critique my writing, there’s a couple of people.

I will have to produce one piece of work each month, which is not too demanding and I think I’m really looking forward to the feed back too.

I’ve written stories for years but not shared them with anyone.

on a forum that I visit regularly attached to the website of one of my all time favourite horror-fantasy authors, it requires that you post a piece of writing at least once a month to be critiqued by other members of the forum.

I think that I can produce work at least once a month, I’d really like to write more often than that and perhaps it could be a prelude to meeting some people off line to discuss writing and perhaps develop a writing and book club.

As we were standing in front of the library this morning, a guy from the writing class I took last spring went in and came out. He stopped and asked if I’d been doing any writing and I said I’d been trying… I said it’s hard to do w/2 children and, for me, no guidance and support. So we got on the subject of a writer’s group! My sister and friend and brother in law have talked about this, too, but never acted on it probably because we’re all family—we’d probably just end up fighting or drinking or copping out and not showing or gossiping about something else… or all of the above. So now I’m all excited anew. I gave him my phone number and said I’d look up information on to have an effective group (I’ve seen stuff like that before…)
He really impressed me at the class last year. At first glance, he’s a middle-aged, small-town, sinewy farmer with a sort of backwoods accent. But when you read his writing (he only wrote one piece during the class but read it aloud for us…) you really change your mind. It was too easy to zone out when people were reading their stories, especially if you didn’t have a copy of it in front of you…but when he read, I was transfixed.
So now I’m all excited…even if it turns out to be just him and me exchanging stories!