About a month ago, Amanda read about starting an ‘article club’ on A Cup of Joe, and sent out an email to a group of friends to see if anyone was interested.  The premise is pretty simple… it’s like a book club, except you read an article.  (Man, I should be a teacher I am SO good at explaining things). 

Look, we’ve all been in a book club at some point.  The last one that I was in was back in like 2002 and it started off SO well.  We all read the book (some utterly depressing book about the poorest, drunkest family in the Maritimes) and had a great discussion.  I think we probably read about 3 or 4 books, and each time, less and less people had finished it.  Until the last one, for which we had to read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and I was shocked to find out that I was THE ONLY ONE WHO FINISHED THE BOOK and I actually quite liked it.  I hope that admitting that does not  result in some sort of ‘fatwa‘ against me… if you read the book, you would know just how insane it is/was that Salman Rushdie had to basically live under police protection after it’s publication (1988) until 1998.  The book is fictional… deal with it.  Ok, so I guess the point that I am making is that an ‘Article Club’ is a great update on the ‘Book Club’.  You have NO excuse to not read the material, because it’s an article… and think of just how diverse the subject matter could be!? 

Amanda chose the first article, Ricky Gervais’ ‘Why I’m an Atheist’.  Hey, if you’re going to start something like this, might as well start BIG.  The discussion was really interesting, and as expected, took many paths and detours. 

For example, who knew Sara was ‘wicken’?**(read comments before you mention the spelling)  Not me, and I’ve known her for like 35 years… Haha.  Sara’s not really wicken… I don’t think… but she sure did talk about it a lot.  I believe in the pic above she was talking about ‘poppits and pins’.  I like this photo because you can really see how focussed Amanda and Liz are on what Sara is talking about, right?

Which was a great segue to indepth discussions of Nadia and Jackie’s sweaters, seen in the pic above, how much of a ‘cat’ person Liz was, and various other completely non-article related banter.  I also like this pic because on the very left side, you can see Liz holding the article, indicating serious committment and concentration, not to mention the copies in front of Nadia and Jackie, Jackie’s phone (obviously for quick research, and not to check messages), and the collection of food and wine.  It’s like a perfect shot (Ahahaha.  No, of course it’s not, because I took it.  But the upside is that I took it with Amanda’s amazing camera, so at least it’s decent quality).

In the end, we kept coming back to the article… mainly because Sara kept yapping about ‘wicken this’ and ‘wicken that’… But the conversation flowed, it helped us get to know more about each other and our beliefs, and there were SO many laughs.  We are on ‘hiatus’ for the upcoming Holiday season, but I can’t think of anything that I could look forward to more in the coming cold, dreary months than hanging with a good group of friends, drinking some wine, and having a good ol’ chat about something interesting.  So, get a group of friends together, pick an article and a date, start your own ‘Article Club’, and keep us posted!  We can share articles and see if any of your friends are in Sara’s wicken.

Filed under:
Do it Yourself, Events by Marnie