Welcome

West Lothian Writers is an informal, creative writing group. We’re a friendly group who write prose, poetry, memoirs, and all genres of fiction.

Meetings are held in-person and online, and your first meeting is free.

Meetings

We meet weekly on Tuesdays at 7-9pm. Our meetings alternate between online and in-person.

Our weekly meetings are a chance for members to present their creative writing to the group and receive friendly and constructive feedback. All feedback is suggestive.

When bringing work to present:

  • Choose work which is 1500 words or less
  • For in-person meetings: please print at least 6 copies to share with the group while we discuss the piece
  • For online meetings: have your document open on your device to speed up sharing time; include line numbers if possible

Fees

Fees go towards room booking costs, zoom costs, and organising group events.

First meeting Free
Subsequent meetings £2 (£1 for concessions)
Annual membership fee £10

Location

Online meetings are held on Zoom. Please email wlwriters@gmail.com for the
meeting link.

In-person meetings are held in:
South barn of Nether Dechmont Farm
Fells Rigg
Carmondean
Livingston
EH54 8AX

Date of Next Meeting

You can check the date of our next meeting on the calendar below. It’s a google calendar so you can download it onto your own google calendar if you wish to:

About Us

West Lothian Writers started in 2006 when, because of a change in circumstances, the West Lothian College Writers left the college and set out on their own. Since then, the group has gone from strength to strength, becoming an independent community writing group supporting writers across West Lothian and beyond.

Our engaged membership meets every week to offer each other advice and support on
their writing. Outside of our weekly meetings, we have also held two writing retreats,
created four anthologies filled with member’s work and organised several workshops with published writers such as Allan Guthrie and Janis Mackay.

Anthologies

Since 2013 West Lothian Writers have been producing anthologies to promote the work of our members. So far we have produced four.

Spectral Notes

West Lothian Writers brought out their fourth anthology, Spectral Notes October 2022. This year we chose a Halloween theme since West Lothian Writers have celebrated the holiday with an annual writing challenge since 2013. click here to read more

Notes from the Multiverse

West Lothian Writers brought out their third anthology, Notes from the Multiverse in November 2018.

Members were asked to submit at most six pieces of varying length from which we would selected up to three to be included. The title of the collection is inspired by Chris Young’s piece Multiversal. Click here to read more

A Well Travelled Notebook

Our second anthology was published in November 2015 and featured fourteen of our members as well as increased editing team with Norman Geddes and Sally Thomson joining the previous three editors. For the second volume an accidental theme of travel emerge during the editing process and this resulted in the name of the anthology. Click here to read more

From the Purple Notebook

Published on 14th March 2014, From the Purple Notebook featured eleven of our members and was edited by the then committee of West Lothian Writers Stephen Shirres, Eric McFarlane and Anne E. Edwards. Click here to read more

Ironstone

Before West Lothian Writers started publishing anthologies quite a few of our members were featured in the three issues of West Lothian’s writing magazine Ironstone. You can find out about the magazine and read the second and third issue here.

Competitions and Submissions

One of the things we work really hard on is creating a list of every competition, anthology and writing magazine looking for work. Over the years it has become clear that there are now so many opportunities out there for writers to publish their work we need more than one list.

In this section the website you will find all sorts of different places to submit your writing including:

  • Competitions and submissions with upcoming deadline
  • Magazines that you can submit to all year round – split into the different kinds of writing they are looking for.
  • Weekly and Monthly Competitions

We try our best to keep this information up to date so please let us know if you find any mistakes, closed magazines or, more importantly, if we’ve missed out any competitions or submissions we may have missed. We’d love to hear from you.

css.php