When NIBS met Trefoil Guild

Last night, I did an author talk - not at a school, but to  the local Trefoil Guild.

I was a guider with the Guide Association for twenty years from the age of eighteen - in fact that's where the name Squidge came from. The Trefoil Guild began as a way of old guides keeping in contact with their units, and has grown and developed to become a section in its own right within the Guiding Movement.

The Trefoil Guild in our District meet at the same place we meet for NIBS (the writing group). NIBS often meets on the same date upstairs, while they meet downstairs.

Because I know many of the current Guild, I was asked to go a Trefoil meeting to tell them about my writing. It just so happened that the date they requested was also a NIBS night, so we combined the two...

It's the first time I've given a talk to a social group. I decided early on that it wasn't just going to be me, talking. I would make Trefoil work, too.

After the 'this is me and how I got to where I am' talk, we tried a few exercises.

Trefoil Guild in their red and beige uniforms

I started with 'I remember...' about school days. As most of the ladies are older, their memories included things like travelling on the utility bus with its wooden seats, but there were other memories that could have been set in any school today. Like being the model that the class painted on a 9th birthday, or going into assembly in alphabetical order. But it warmed everybody's pens and pencils up...

I demonstrated my story bag items, and shared a few of the ideas that the children I've worked with have come up with in the past; the flame-farting dragon who loved baked beans went down well.

There's always a rainbow sock in the bag...but only one!

And then...you guessed it...paint colours! On one table we had a 'Cup of custard' to go with the raisinless 'Raisin Pudding'. On another, a spurned woman burnt the orchid (Burnt Orchid) sent by her lover. 'Benjamin's Buttons' were always green, but he hated green. And 'Bavarian Hops' was going to be developed into an Alpine dance...

Pens, pencils and brain cells hard at work!

The ladies certainly seemed to enjoy themselves, and it gave me the confidence that even in a shorter, evening social meeting, you can still share your writing journey and get people writing for themselves and having fun with words.

And look what they gave me as a thank you - a beautiful orchid, because they'd heard I liked them and mine were often in flower (unlike my mum, whose orchid flowers die back and from then on only send up leaves...)