For five years my writing group has been trying to name itself. The suggestions have ranged from Write Club to Urban Scrawl to Verisimilitude to Work Junkies. At public readings we have been forced to call ourselves “The Writing Group.” Coming to a consensus, the lowest common denominator, was impossible.
My writing group has been my anchor these last five years as I’ve written two novels and published Live From Palestine. Every Wednesday, barring life-threatening surgery or typhoons, we would come together in some locally owned coffeeshop to critique, edit, talk about writing—and then head to the nearest bar for more of the same. After so many years, baristas across Denver awaited our business—and by proxy the magnet business of writing and reading groups that seemed to magically blossom on Wednesdays in our wake. We saved many a dying coffeeshop and put many more on the map. We drank carafes of wine in Italian restaurants, scotches in dive bars, and pitchers and pitchers worth of Pabst Blue Ribbon, especially when one or more of us was broke. We imagined ourselves like The Bloomsbury group, or like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Pound. We traveled twice to the Aspen Literary Festival, hosted or attended dozens of readings, book signings; we wrote through one divorce, one gay wedding, two babies and one spin-off (my son, now 7, is working on his second novel, the sequel to Cat and Frog’s Adventure.)
Between us we have written eight books and more stories and poems then I could count. We are more then colleagues, we are fellow artists and sanity for one another in the often cruel world of publishing.
So it was a painful realization, nine months ago, to accept that it was time for me to leave the nest.
I remember the moment perfectly: I was having lunch with Rikki Ducornet, which in itself is a great pleasure, and she casually mentioned that at some point a writer needs to stop showing their unfinished work to others, needs to cut the umbilical cord of writing groups and workshops and trust their intuition. As a child needs to outgrow a parent, a writer needs to outgrow the potential crutch—dare I say the addiction—of feedback.
I had to chew on that a while. I chewed on it through the birth of my second child, I chewed on it as I tried on different writing groups, took workshops, all hoping in vain to find the one group that made me feel like I did five years ago when every bit of feedback was a light bulb illuminating my writing. But none did. Not only did I not find another writing group, but I became angry at myself for my lack of faith in my own writing, angry at my artistic steps backward. Angry that I couldn’t seem to find other writers to inspire me the way I had once been inspired by others.
But I didn’t need to. What I learned from over 250 meetings with my talented friends changed my writing forever. And having those people pop the bottle of bubbly when my first book was published was the kind of intimacy every writer craves. But I see why we never came up with a group name, why Word Junkies or Write Club never stuck: we are multiple entities with multiple talents and writing futures as varied as we are. In seeking to create unity, we instead created ourselves.
I work as an editor, and the editing process is crucial for all writers. But you will know who you are when I say that some of us just keep editing and editing—looking for the one person, the one editor, the one writing group member who will say “This is a masterpiece.” So we keep revising and resubmitting and revising and resubmitting until we are writing for approval, not from the solitary well of intuition where masterpieces are really born.
So now I stand on the edge of a new world as have many before me, a scary leap away from feedback and into intuition—and the fear of isolation. The time to step away. To trust myself. Trust my work. And know that I am surrounded by a legacy of writers whether we meet once a week or not.
But maybe I’ll go just one more Wednesday…
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