A Writer’s Night in September

Suzanne Strempek Shea grew up in a small Polish-American Western Massachusetts village, dreaming of becoming a horse trainer or an artist. Her first published writing was a newspaper she handwrote and drew for her parents every Saturday night when they went polka dancing and she stayed overnight downstairs at the home of her maternal grandparents. The Nutty News had only a circulation of one copy, but it was a start. She fell into writing in high school, when she went down to the office of The Palmer Journal and Monson Register, her town’s newspaper, to complain that it never wrote a story about the high school’s hockey team, which contained both a sport and a couple of boys she loved. The editor told her there were no reporters free to go to the games, and if she went, as she did to every game, she and her pal Barbara Sekula being the statisticians, why didn’t she just write up a story each week and hand it in for publication. She learned to write and shoot and develop on deadline. She also learned that it paid to complain.

You may register by calling 413-565-4150, option 1. Or you can just show up. The Longmeadow Adult Center is located at 211 Maple Road, Longmeadow.