‘Catalyst Sessions’ recap: Maureen McDole

There’s a bit of a silver lining in the Covid cloud for Keep St. Pete Lit’s writing classes, as founder and director Maureen McDole explained Tuesday on The Catalyst Sessions.

“What’s great about Zoom is, you can actually show your work – you can show your desktop to the group,” she said. “And one of our students lives in Maine, so she’s sharing the Writers’ Group with her whole Maine Writer’s Group. Because she goes away for the summer.

“And a lot of our students, especially when we had classes at the Morean Arts Center in person, were snowbirds. They would go away for the summer, so our classes would drop down.”

In the current climate, awkward as it is, one does not have to physically be in St. Pete to take writing classes from Keep St. Pete Lit. “It’s opening up all these different possibilities,” McDole said.

Still, like everybody else on the planet, she’s waiting for the day the pandemic is history.

The St. Pete native covered a lot of ground in her second Cat Session (the first was in mid-April) – she talked about her poetry writing and the “existential crisis” that it solved, her extended family (about which she plans to write) and the complexities of being an introvert in the world of nonprofits, where sometimes you just gotta get out there and pitch and shout.

Today on The Catalyst Sessions: Country music mega-star (and Eagles guitarist) Vince Gill joins us.

Streaming weekdays at 7 p.m. on the Catalyst Facebook page. All episodes are archived on our YouTube channel.