Of the eyes that looked at me, all were different but expectant. As though I had some magic I could impart that could transform their ordinary words to epic proportions and make them all famous in a day. One wrong word could change that expectancy to dismay, could fell the forest full of dreams they had tended and nursed so long. Many women, in solitary lives, knowing nothing of the others, meeting here, in this ordinary place, with their notebooks and their pens and their hopes, carried from so far away. They knew that I could do something for them; they knew that I was something other than they were and that I could not possibly be ordinary.

I had hopes, I must admit. But they were nothing such as these that were held before me. I began to realize that I could only inspire them, but would they see the inspiration and know it for themselves? Could I translate my extraordinary to a language that they could hear, that they could interpret for themselves? Women I could not fool; being a woman, I knew I could not get away with a mere recital or with lecturing from a podium five feet from the nearest participant.

They would have to leave their ordinary spaces and give to each other what they needed in themselves. And I would have five nights in which to show them that it could be done, that they could become a circle of women who loved writing.

Five nights. Five nights in a lifetime. I heard the tentative recitals, saw the hesitant smiles, the glances back at me to see if they had done well. I saw the moments of anxiety mixed with the heat of the ink spreading across the pages. Writing. Two minutes. Five minutes. Half an hour to tell them what I knew and what they already knew if they had heard themselves speak.

I got a five dollar cheque from a woman who worked with her husband in their own business.

I got two twenties from a woman on welfare whose illness made her irregular in attendance. I got the threes and the tens and the in-between. There was no money for me to say that that was why I had come, to continue making the big bucks that I was supposed to be making, that everyone else believed I should be making.

But they listened well and they wrote. Exercises of words, worlds of words. Stories of life and living and suffering. Little peeks into secret lives made into fiction and given other names; hidden away for years like dusty books and taken out for other women who knew all too well the story that was theirs too.

Tears on paper. Laughter. More tears. The sheer pleasure of having a space to play with words and let them flow, and not have someone tell you these were not the proper words for a woman to be writing. That these were not the stories a proper woman should be telling. Homemakers, stockbrokers, secretaries. Lesbians and straights. Young and old. Sharing as though there was no world out there to say they couldn't; to say that if you came from this class or that class you mustn't to say that if you were this age or that age you wouldn't.

And in the process this room, this ordinary room off an ordinary hall in an ordinary building, had become something more: something that crossed and connected and wove the threads between these women. Making them smile and laugh and write together. Making them want to meet together again, on their own, when it was all over. To remember the warmth, to continue its growth.

On the last night, when they had all given their thanks and left, I knew that only some would continue. But those that would were the ones who had seen their own glowing selves, had seen their words and marveled at what they had produced.

And in the end I could only sit back and smile, having seen it too.

Ceridwen Collins-West lives and writes in Manitoba. She has a passion for canoeing and hiking and all the wild things that go with camping. Otherwise she carries on an on-going affair with her computer.