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Retirees share literary love Writers Club offers support, critiques By BILL VARBLE A dozen people sit listening to a big man with a white mustache read a story involving a late-night confrontation and a shotgun. After 10 minutes or so, Bill Greene breaks off and lays the manuscript on the table. "Any suggestions?" he asks. The question breaks the mood, plucking listeners out of the tense midnight of a fictional world and plunking them back in a nondescript meeting room. The pool of lantern light holding back the darkness in the story gives way to a gray spring morning with flowers blooming outside the window of the Medford Senior Center. The Senior Writers Club meets here from 10 a.m. to noon each Thursday morning to take turns reading from their work and giving each other critiques. Call 772-2273 for information. The club is thriving now, with 15 or more writers bringing work to read and discuss. But it was pretty shaky when Jim Brunner, of Medford, started it five years ago. "The first three weeks I was the only one who showed up," he says with a laugh. Brunner, 80, is a retired arid lands ecologist who did enough writing in his career to know that the only way to learn to write is to begin writing. It's a message that's getting out. "I've always been interested in writing," says Willa Johnson, of Phoenix. "Within a week after I retired two years ago I signed up. I love it." Several writers have sold pieces to small periodicals. One woman has been rewriting the diary of a grandmother who homesteaded Orcas Island, reportedly a ripping good read. After Greene reads there are comments. One writer likes the development of the scene. It's not good to be in too much of a hurry to get to the action, another says. John Dutcher goes next, reading from a piece called "Change," an atmospheric remembrance set in the firs and yews and vine maples of the Southern Oregon woods. There are owls here, and pileated woodpeckers and snags and barber chairs (stumps that ripped jagged instead of breaking cleanly). There are warming fires and hot coffee. There are guys who are a little loose with their dynamite. More discussion. "I like your dialogue." "Good description." One writer knew some loggers like the guys with the dynamite, who blasted a road to smithereens without managing to clear the culvert that was the original problem. "It's a wonder guys like that survived as long as they did," Greene says. Dutcher, who retired from the BLM, is following the old writer's dictum to write about what you know. "Well, I'm breaking that again," Frank Jaslow says. Laughter goes around the table. "Are you being a woman narrator again?" No, but Jaslow's short story, "Mary McCarthy," is set in the San Francisco of the early 20th century. It's a bittersweet account of the romance of an Irish Catholic girl and a doomed young soldier, told in a spare style. As the omniscient narrator brings the story to a sad end, listeners have again been transported to another time and place. It's a literary story, is the consensus. "Way too much for Women's World." "Skip that trashy stuff." "Hey, I sent something to Women's World, and it wasn't trashy." "That $1,000 they pay isn't trashy." The discussion turns to suicide, the key event in the story. "Women enjoy self-sacrifice," Jaslow says. "But suicide's not brave," Mary Burns says. "It's the easy way out." "I should have got this advice before I wrote it," Jaslow says. More laughter. So the morning goes. "We contend there's no use putting down stuff that bores the poor person to death," Brunner says. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA