How it Feels Getting Back to a Writing Workshop After 3 Whole Years

Sadly with the pandemic and the rest of the nonsense I didn’t attend our usual speculative fiction workshop at ALEF since 2019.

Our writing workshop has been going on for 20 years and the number of inside jokes and rituals has come up to a ridiculous amount.

The short stories are anonymous so we try to guess who wrote which.
We do a reveal every time, and writers who ended up guessing right get an “award certificate”. We also gave one for the worst guesser of all time, who got 0 guesses right, a statistical impossibility.
We have a time limit of 1 hour per discussion round because it used to be recorded on a 60 min cassette, now it’s digital but we keep it the same
We have a printed card that we can play once per workshop where the writer can play it and rant on about the story because he has lots to say, regardless of the time limit. That’s a joke because one writer used to do that and he was unstoppable.
and lots of other inside jokes that make no sense at all to an outsider, like asking the host to fetch you a beer (you simply don’t do that).
Also the workshop is an excuse to bring in lots of food and pastries to share from all over Greece, and even from abroad.
an entire weekend wasn’t enough so at some point we established a meet and greet dinner the night before at a meat tavern. That helps new members get to know us before spending 2 days at some stranger’s house. We always order kokoretsi.