Gathering

June 2015

We gathered in a restaurant I remembered, in a town where I had lived. Its windows facing a small canal, on its side a quiet alley. We sat around a wooden table in the back of the room, on what seemed to be a former church bench. Some paintings of Venice -where some of us had been, last year- on the walls. While discussing our latest projects and whereabouts, our interests and stories, a moment of silence came over me when a delicate book was presented, as an unexpected acknowledgement of what had brought us together. This small group of different people, simply bound by a shared idea, had taken the effort to write about places as diverse as a Swedish church or a Caribbean village, to re-live lessons in city and literature, to experiment with the structure and meaning of text, to dwell between lines or to evoke poetic machines. So this is a thank you, for that collection, and for gathering irregularly on this floating place we share, out there, in the open, to describe and share our readings of places, fictional or real, this Writingplace.

KH