I’d ‘done a workshop’ for the Taumaranui writers’ group once before, in winter. I’d enjoyed meeting them. And on this weekend at the end of summer their Friday night meeting seemed like a good excuse for a spin up Highway One in the old Toyota.

I arrived at Bill Taylor’s, somewhere, nowhere, out of Raurimu, in time for dinner, and the now famous cream sponge – recipe in Common Ground. We stared up at hawks on the 200 feet high, 90 year old Norwegian spruce. I watched the thistledown blowing – just like Glover wrote. Tui belched at each other. Kereru thrashed in the hohiria tree.

Then we drove on, 40 ks, to Taumarunui. Out the side window Taranaki was like a giant pyramid in a flaming red desert.

The meeting was in ex-Taumarunui librarian Helen’s huge sitting room: comfortable sofas, flokati rugs, giant coffee tables, the clatter of platters of cheese, bottles of wine. The group’s a perfect way to relax for a couple of hours, share the joys and frustrations of writing, get other people to listen to your as-yet-unpublished words. When we walked in, Margie was asking Glenda “We want to know what happens next,” about her story that she’d circulated to them all on the Internet. Glenda said she’d like to know as well! Any suggestions! Everyone laughed.
 
It was quite a gathering. There was Dick, an English ex- journo, now tutoring correspondence courses. Wendy, an ex-psychiatrist. Margie, South African, is a physics teacher at the high school. She also paints watercolours, has forty acres of blueberries, and writes. “Picked 3 tonnes this year.” I learnt that you have to dry blueberries out before storing them in the fridge.

I was sorry not to see Dorothy the black Zimbabwe ex-hospital matron but she’s got a job in Hamilton closer to her Auckland family, and the job has to be better than working in a rest home in Taumarunui, someone with her qualifications. Bill told me about the time he drove to the blueberry farm and saw Dorothy walking down a row with a basket of blueberries balanced on her head.

There was also a primary school teacher with a wicked sense of humour, a romance writer, a young Maori social worker who’s undergone a year’s debilitating drug trial to try to get rid of Hep C., a Dutchman who writes for heavy metal music magazines, a beautiful Indian woman and a new man who Helen had met in cardiac exercise group. He shared with us a reminiscence about a trip on the Auckland ferry when he was a child. His wife sat beside him while he read.

One of the group is presently doing a Massey course in ‘life writing’. My co-authored book, Common Ground, is apparently an example of ‘life writing’, so we talked about my returning to ‘do a workshop’ in ‘life writing’.

I bought blueberries the next day, took them home, patted each one dry and put them uncovered in the fridge, just one of my treasures from the weekend at the writers’ group.