Barbara J. Hamby

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Creative Writing

I’ve been taking Creative Writing classes for about fifteen years, first in Vancouver, Washington and now at a Portland Community College class in Tigard, Oregon. Each session of classes consists of a small nucleus of people who have been in previous classes, as well as a few new students. This keeps the mixture more interesting with new stories, new styles and a huge variety of experiences to share. Most students are over fifty, so have many things to write about.

The class I’m in now consists of mostly fiction writers. A few have never written before, but are incredibly talented. I’m not a fiction writer, but prefer being in this smaller class. The morning memoir classes were split due to the large number of people who enrolled for the latest session.

The fiction venues vary from Christian to Science fiction to regular novels and short stories. Reviewing any type of writing is helpful to me. I always learn something new at each class session. Sometimes the news is not encouraging, but worth knowing.

Depending on the number of students who show up for each class, most have time to read a few pages of their work. The instructor and other students offer critiques and suggestions for improvement, as well as praise when the work seems perfect.

The best part about the classes is the motivation to keep writing. It is so easy to become lazy as we grow older.

Writing this blog piece each day usually gets my fingers and my brain limbered up for working on other writing projects, also.

I can’t close this day’s entry without commenting on the great view we had tonight of the lunar eclipse. I drove to the grocery store, watching it all the way. On my return, the moon was almost totally in shadow when I came in the house. We have had so much cloudy weather, that I appreciate a clear day and evening. There were good shots of Mt. St. Helens on the news tonight, as well. It is still steaming.