A select few – Writers in Stone

A select few from our writing group, Writers in Stone, met in an excellent local hostelry, The Black Cat, to take a few photos to promote our latest publication, a collection of the stories we have written over the past year. Our anthology is “V” and is available on Amazon. Here is something I wrote last year about how I managed to write something for one of our monthly challenges, and you will find it in the anthology – my story that is!

It was our writing group get-together today, and such a difficult challenge was set last time – ‘Cloak’. Yes, we were given the task of cudgelling/wracking our brains to write something based on/inspired by the word cloak. Cudgel, by the way comes from “a short, thick stick used as a weapon,’ Old English ‘cycgel’ club with a rounded head” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cudgel . Back to cloak (“from Old North French cloque (Old French cloche, cloke) ‘travelling cloak,’ from Medieval Latin clocca ‘travellers’ cape,’ literally ‘a bell,'”)
I decided fairly early on in my thinking about ‘cloak’ that I wouldn’t try and write about a garment, and it didn’t take long to realise that I would write about a person with the name ‘Cloak’. Even if no-one in reality was called Cloak, I would make it up, but I found that in fact Cloak is a surname. It’s not common, it was first found in Surrey in the thirteenth century when names and surnames were somewhat fluid. Maybe it actually meant cloak, as in an item of clothing, maybe it was connected to the word for bell, when a cloak – as in item of clothing, was shaped somewhat like… well, like a cloak!
I hadn’t many thoughts when I settled down to write, but a story emerged, of a person called Cloak, Isobel Cloak. I imagined her attending a meeting of a society whose members had unusual or unique names. It was a paltry story – I seemed to lack imagination on this one, but Isobel attended the meeting because she was a police officer and wanted to arrest someone purporting to be her but called Isabel Cloke. I confess it was rather feeble, but I tried to make it amusing.
As ever I was interested to hear what the others had managed to write. Macaque the poet, continued a story about a family of apparently parent-less children, possibly in the southern states of the USA, who were threatened by someone called Cloak. Fenja Hill, another great writer, wrote a chilling tale about a pandemic, Jane wrote the beginning of what might be a ghost story or might be a story of revenge and murder, and I wrote abut Isabel Cloak.
It is fascinating to see where different writers take the same stimulus – next month we have to write about ‘something overheard‘, a play on the title of a BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Something Understood.’