Those present: Pat, Claudette, Kathleen, Linda I finally made contact with the writers group I heard about in Somerset. Writers in Progress meets the first and third Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. It would be nice to have members of our group attend their meetings and vice versa. Check out the group web site: BarbaraPurbaugh.com. Barbara Purbaugh heads the group. The Beanery Online Literary Magazine is progressing slowly after the three site breakdowns, but it is recovering slowly. Discussion time was lively. What happens when a magazine discovers the author the submission is attributed to is not the actual author? Further, this is done in apparent innocence. This happened with the Beanery Online Literary Magazine at ProBlogs.com/beanerywriters. Last fall a poem was submitted and the authorship was given as a child in the family of the contributor. Recently it was discovered the poem is distributed all over the I-net, all “anonymously” or “author unknown.” One submission from 1969 listed an author’s name. How should the Beanery Online Literary Magazine handle this situation? This was the “real life” question I brought to the group for discussion. Options raised included deleting the entry; leaving the entry as is but publishing an honest apology in the comment section, explaining what happened; inquiring on the I-net about other possible authorships and posting the above question on writing sites in an attempt to discover other options. Writers group members asked whether or not the author listed in 1969 is actually the true author, or whether he saw the poem and claimed authorship. Could the “child author” listed on our post actually have been an accurate claim? Another point was made: was this poem even written by a child? Another question asked by a writer’s group member: if the author of an item is unknown, can you use the item in its entirety? The discussion moved on to being: how much of any article written by someone else can be used without the author’s permission? If the article states “do not reprint without permission” can you quote a few lines of it without getting permission? I passed around a copy of Westmoreland History Magazine, which published my article on Bob Mendler, the holocaust victim. We had one item to critique. The Beanery Writers Group will take a summer break for their July 13 meeting. They will reconvene on July 27---same place and time (The Coffee Bean Café from 1:00-3:00 p.m.) ---written by Carolyn | 
