During the first few years of its life, it had no name. That came a few years later, as shown by this timeline:

• 2005: A group of eight who had recently completed a writing course began to meet every Monday morning in a Sobey's Community Room. Although I had completed a different writing course, I joined their group soon after.
  
  
• 2008: Six members of the group contributed short stories to an anthology that we called Monday Morning Musings. Our group name emerged as an afterthought: Monday Morning Musers.

That name stuck for at least five years, until we began meeting monthly in a program room at a Halifax Public Library branch. The name "Afterwords" was chosen to serve as our name in publicizing our meetings which were now open to the public, as library programs generally are.

Open meetings may have been a disadvantage: since library programs are open, anyone can drop in at any time, so on any given month, we may get one or two new individuals we don't know. Since our sessions always start with introducing ourselves and telling what kind of writing we do, it takes time away from our main activities of writing exercises and sharing what we've written. Writing groups work best when members have developed a degree of comfort and trust with each other, and that takes time.