I am convener and founder member of Bounds Green Book Writers. The idea arose from my friendship and collaboration with Elaine. We knew each other from political activity, and discovering that we both wrote, we swapped manuscripts for beta-reading. Her beta-reading skill and wisdom is genius, and over the years, she has given me the most incredible advice.
The next milestone came when I attended an over-50s quiz with a friend and met Rajes and Arlene. Arlene was editor of a magazine for elders, and she gave me a job. Rajes and I discovered we were both writers, and I successfully proposed to her the idea of joining up with Elaine to form a writers group. Moreover, our team won the quiz.
Arlene later featured an article about the ‘Bounds Green Book Writers’ in her magazine, so it was she who gave us our name. (I can’t remember what we called ourselves before).
We also had for a while Ann and Lynda, whom I hope will rejoin us at some point. Lynda’s YA novel Looked After Boy was published while she was with us. And we hope to see Ann’s Irish saga Women on the Cusp published someday. I’m proud to say that four of our members published novels while working with us.
I think Mark contacted us via our blog, we discovered he lived not far from Bounds Green and invited him to join us, so we are now co-ed.
BGBW is a writers group with a difference. We don’t just sit around drinking tea. We meet monthly at my house (in Bounds Green) and swap beta-reading. But we also, at each meeting, have a presentation by one of us on some topic or skill relating to writing. These presentations are then repackaged and posted on our ‘Writing advice and comment’ blog on creative writing techniques. During the ensuing month we swap chapters of our books in progress and do ‘homework’, exercises practicing the skills we learned from the presentation, which we also post on our blog.
During the Covid pandemic, we were lonely, so we published the online Lockdown Lit — a collection of ‘creative writing inspired by the coronavirus experience’, for which we solicited contributions from all over.
Our first short story collection, Bounds Green Unbound, will be published in 2025.
Susie Helme 