The G.R. LitFest was, by all accounts, a rousing success. The G.R. Poetry is LIT! event, in which I participated with the Grand River Poetry Collective, went spectacularly well, with dozens of readers, writers, and other participants in our many panels and open-mic events throughout the day on Friday, June 20.

I have not really participated in the local writing community for several years, thanks to COVID, work, and the ten thousand minutiae which eat away at free time like an infestation of ticks. But now the fire is lit again and I feel the deep-down-in-the-guts drive to write, to listen, to engage, and to be part of something beautiful! So I will be an active participant in the Poetry Collective and I am assembling the past thirty years of half-completed writing to see if there is anything salvageable in that big wonderful mess.

The Insecure Writers Support Group question for July 2025 is: Is there a genre you haven’t tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

I think historical fiction would be fun, mostly because of the significant amount of research involved. At the moment I think stories of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and the like, would be a great deal of fun to research and write.

Any of the lesser-known cultures of the 2500 – 1500 B.C. era would be interesting. And any knowledge I gain could easily be put to use in genre fiction (The Bulgar tribes but with DRAGONS!) There are also several subgenres which could be fun, depending on how fine one splits that hair – LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, or one of the myriad and occasionally ephemeral *punk variations.

All of which is to say, there is a lot to choose from.

How about you, reader? Are there new literary directions in which you would like to strike?

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
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and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.