(Riverton, WY) For the past nine years, a group of local writers and authors come together at the Riverton Library on the second Tuesday of the month, each reading excerpts from their latest compositions and collections…sharing their successes, as well as their “writer’s block” challenges.
Known as the “Westword Writers,” the group was first formed after a Wyoming Writers Group poetry reading event entitled One County, Many Voices. Organized by award-winning poetry writer Carol Deering, the event was a part of National Poetry Month, which is celebrated every year in April.
“It was mostly about diversity, but people could come and read about their background or about anything, really,” Deering said. “As time went by, the topics sort of melted away.”
“I think we must have been sitting around one day, talking about writing, and said, ‘We should start getting together and sharing some of our writings,’” said Echo Klaproth, cowboy poet and former Wyoming Poet Laureate. She is now a hospice chaplain and has written a book entitled A Requiem to the Vitality of Life, which can be found on Amazon.
“We started on July 14, 2014, and at that time, we were actually meeting twice a month,” Klaproth said. Young adult writers met on Saturdays since they couldn’t meet during the weekdays.
“We hosted a couple of readings and invited school students,” she said. “Those were a lot of fun because all of us could get up and share, but we were hoping to encourage young writers from the college and the high school and middle school in particular.”
Then COVID hit, and the group couldn’t meet for a while.
“I wrote articles for the newspaper on self-help and how to deal with depression,” said retired psychologist Chuck Rogers, who is also a lyricist/singer/songwriter. “More singer than songwriter,” he said. Sometimes, Rogers brings his guitar to the group.
“Most of us have a book or a book in the process of publishing,” added Deering, who had worked at the CWC Library for 25 years, eventually becoming the library’s Director. She has twice won the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry and has written for several online and traditional journals, such as The High Plains Register, Prairie Wolf Press Review, and more. Her book, Havoc & Solace: Poems from the Inland West is also available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Strastrugi Press.
“Most of the time, I just come and hang out with all these talented writers,” said David Potter, who has written for Wyoming Wildlife and published a book “a few years back, about a bunch of guys who all went to college together and all ended up in Vietnam. Mainly sea stories.”
Ted Judson is an accomplished fiction/non-fiction and sci-fi author who has several published books that can be found on Amazon, including Tom Wedderburn’s Life, Fitzpatrick’s War, The Martian General’s Daughter, The Sultan’s Emissary, The Thief Catcher, and Hell Can Wait.
Bart Ringer retired after 37 years with the Riverton Police Department, has written for the local newspaper, and has one published book, Routine Patrol: Memoirs of a Small Town Cop, also available on Amazon.
“When I write on my own, just for the fun of it…it’s a little bit of everything,” Ringer said. “I like to write ‘Twilight-zoney,’ sci-fi stuff.”
Barb Rogers wrote a book called A Borrowed Address, which is the story of her cousin who was homeless, and they had shared letters between them. “I just wanted to tell his story,” she said.
They “can’t not write.”
The Westword Writers got their name from one of their founding members, the late Betty Starks Case, author of Maggie: Set Free in The Wyoming Rockies and This is Wyoming – Live. Case wrote numerous feature stories and columns for which she won two Wyoming Press Association Pacemaker Awards, National Press Women, and Wyoming Historical Society Awards. She earned the 1994 Governor’s Arts Award for Wyoming Writers, Inc., and received their highest award for meritorious service.
The group meets on the second Tuesday of the month at the Riverton Library and welcomes writers of all mediums and genres. Many of the members of their group have done book signings and author reading events, most recently at the Bookmarked Literary Arts Festival in Lander.
They had a critique form that they used when they first started, setting up some rules and guidelines, “but we don’t really use them anymore because we’ve all been together for so long,” Klaproth said. Their core group consisted of other authors who had attended for a while, and then they eventually would branch off and do their own thing.
“People have come and gone over the years, but this is kind of the core bunch of us that have stuck with it,” Klaproth continued. “This organization…these guys help me. We all come together and share and critique one another. It’s just helpful to sit with writers. Our partners, husbands, or wives might say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s really good‘…but they don’t help us, right? So it’s been a great resource to have this group to come to, or just send something out through email and say, ‘What do you think about this?‘”
“Today’s writers don’t tend to write in a garret, far removed from their busy lives,” said Deering. “They seek other writers for critique and a sense of how well they’re doing. The library has been very supportive of our Westword Writers meetings, and I have had invaluable comments from the members…perspectives I hadn’t realized would work well in a poem…when to enlarge the “story” behind a poem…or when to take out a word (like ‘hoodoos’) that readers might not understand.”
“One of the things I’ve always said and is always apparent in this group is that there isn’t a person in this room that can’t not write,” added Klaproth. “Whether it ever gets published or not…I never wrote anything when I was getting started, to get it published. That was not a part of my deal. I just wanted to save my family heritage. I wanted to save the stories. And I think that, at the end of the day, that it’s true for each of us here, with all of the stories we tell…it’s just a bottom line, I think, for people who write. We just can’t not write.”
The next meeting of the Westword Writers is Tuesday, October 10, from 1:30-3:00 p.m. at the Riverton Library.