Page 33 - 2016 April Voices

JOURNEYS. . .

Spotlight on Thrill of the Quill
By Alexis Mason, DTM

If you regularly read the Spotlight columns feedback. The evaluator facilitates those
in Voices (and I hope you do), you have noticed discussions.
that each month features a different and very
interesting member of our awesome district Lots of writing and lots of opportuni-
7. This time, however, our attention will turn ties to speak and provide feedback make for
to one of our several niche clubs. fascinating meetings.

Thrill of the Quill has been in existence The group meets monthly in
for about ten years. It originally met at Frog Vancouver, Washington. Something else you
Pond Church after district meetings, which may find very interesting. The main group
generally occurred every month, except for is always available to help members in other
conference and TLI months. parts of the district set up their own writers’
club. They would be satellites to The Thrill of
The name of the club was suggested by the Quill. They would pay dues to the main
Lee Coyne. The purpose was to be in support club and meet when and where they wish.
of those members in our district who were Toastmasters International requires clubs
interested in writing, either as blog writers, to meet a minimum of twelve times a year.
technical writers for their work, poets, writers Thrill does. The club meets the first Saturday
in all genres, and people who had put writing of each month except for conference months.
in one of its various forms on their bucket list. Then it meets the second Saturday. The meet-
ings run from 9:30 to 11:00 in the morning.
The format of the club meetings Guests are encouraged.
has changed little over the years. There are
prepared speeches which are always manual If you are interested in forming your
speeches, of course. In recent years, the own writers’ club, the members of Thrill are
club selects themes for the year during the ready and excited to help you. Please contact
club success plan meeting, generally held in Alexis Mason (Alexis@AlexisLLC.com) for
June. The first speaker of the day speaks to help in getting started.
that theme and the other speakers may, too,
but those speeches don’t necessarily follow
the theme. The first speaker also serves as
Table Topics Master. During table topics, the
members write for ten minutes on the topic
assigned, which is connected to the theme
of the meeting. After the writing period,
each member reads what they produced
during the ten minutes for round robin
feedback.

The feedback portion for the
speeches is slightly different as well.
Each speech has an assigned evaluator
who completes the evaluation in the speaker’s
manual. Each member also provides oral

Volume 2 Issue 10 - APRIL 2016 33