I had a very pleasant day yesterday, as I attended the first writers workshop I've come across in the southeast of South Australia. I only moved here a year ago and I still miss the many wonderful groups I belonged to in Perth. Since Perth is a city of over a million people, you can find groups or classes for almost anything you care to name: in the twenty years I lived there I belonged, at various times, to groups devoted to Astrology, Ballet, Belly Dance, Buddhism (all schools are represented in Perth), Chi Gong, Editing, French conversation, Genealogy, Indian dance (Bharat natyam style, but it was possible to find groups for other styles, too), Meditation, Operatic chorus singing, Personal Growth, Sanskrit grammar, Shakespeare, Spanish Dance, Speculative Fiction, Tai Chi, Writing and Yoga. (There were probably others: those are just the ones I can remember with a couple of minutes' recollection.) In short, there are things happening in cities that simply don't happen in country towns, and those, together with ready access to the state libraries, art galleries and museums are the things I miss most about city life. And that's before I even start to think of dear friends and family members who still live in Perth while I live over 2,000 miles away. Now I'm feeling sorry for myself:-)

Yesterday, however, was an oasis in a desert of days. A group known as Coastal Quills ran a superb one-day workshop called Writer's Journey, facilitated by the delightful Peter Dunn, a writer and illustrator resident in Millicent, a small town some 30 miles from where I live. Peter has cleverly devised a series of reflective exercises to help writers consider the outer journey as parallel to the inner one. We spent time meditating on the history of our lives in writing – when did we first realise we wanted to write? How did the desire manifest? What barriers might have presented themselves on inner and outer levels that prevented us from fulfilling our dreams? What events or defining moments reveal, in retrospect, that the vision stayed alive, even if not manifesting on an outward level? What do we really want out of life? If we want to write, how can we, starting with the tools and opportunities we have in the here-and-now, set tangible, realistic and measurable goals towards fulfilling our writing dreams?

I think every one of the eighteen participants, some of whom had travelled for up to a hundred miles to attend the workshop, went away uplifted, enthusiastic, and no longer feeling quite as alone as they did. For we writers are a queer breed. Generally, we prefer our own company to that of others and oftimes we find the inner life more interesting than the outer one. Yet we crave occasional contact with like-minded others to reassure us that we are not anti-social misfits or crazy eccentrics. We need opportunities to remind ourselves that we have an important place in society. We are the chroniclers of past, present and future; investigators of the human condition in all its many forms, real or imagined. No civilisation has ever survived without such chroniclers, nor ever will.

We are writers. And to the individual writer, the journey of investigation is more important than the destination.

There were five or six people in the group who live close enough to me to make regular connection possible. At least one attendee was a fellow spec-fic writer; others shared my passions for history and genealogy and one or two even expressed interest in joining a Shakespeare group if I form one. Another is a fellow Belly Dance enthusiast and has promised to put me in touch with a teacher. WOW!

Great hopes are in the air and great plans are afoot, therefore. Add to this that my friend Annalou in Adelaide has invited me to stay with her for the duration of the Writers Festival in March next year and you have one cheerful and hopefully unblocked Satima. I plan to set aside a day this week when I will not edit, not critique others' work, not answer e-mails nor answer the phone. I will sit down and write the first chapter of part three of the WIP, even if it's crap.

Now, all I have to do it psych myself up to that – wish me luck!

PS I want to publicly express my thanks to Peter Dunn (get a website, Peter!), Steven Davies and the Coastal Quills crew for putting on such a fine workshop. More, please!