Dear readers,
Life is better with friends--this proved itself to me again yesterday, when, in the midst of me fretting over how to organize this newsletter, a brown paper package arrived unexpectedly in the mail. It was from one of my very best friends, sent for no particular reason, a pure gesture in friendship. What joy!
The package harbored my favorite type of tea
(red tea with a tad of vanilla), a bar of tempting dark chocolate, a greeting in the form of a bag of flower seeds (linking me back to last newsletter's idea of planting something), and this cheerful card: "Life is better with friends." The
card is the perfect illustration for what I wanted this newsletter to focus on: friends, and more specifically, writing friends. Is that serendipity or what?
This past month I was fortunate enough to spend an entire week at the conference my former online writing group holds every two years at a regional park on the banks
of the Potomac in northern Virginia. While I did lead a session on how to write scenes and sat in on several other inspiring sessions, for me this conference is really a reunion with long-time writing friends. The writer's life is mainly a solitary one; but to sustain it, it is crucial to have a group of supportive friends with whom one can exchange work, commiserate with, learn from and be inspired by. Fellow sisters and brothers-in-arms whom we can cheer on and who cheer us
on. I always share the same cabin with the friend I visited in Shanghai three years ago (see my Shanghai trip blog posts). Every night we stay up late and have the kind of conversations we'd never have time for in everyday life. Before the conference begins I always visit another dear friend in the D.C.
area who is a visual artist, and one of my oldest friends who now lives in Baltimore comes and spends the last night at the cabin with me. In addition, another writer friend took the time to drive up from Richmond for an afternoon to discuss his memoir. It was a week of deep immersion in friendship, utterly exhausting but so worth it.
How to Build a Community of Writers:
Many of our conversations, as
we were so lucky to find ourselves in the midst of this flourishing group of fellow writers, were about how to find and sustain that kind of community. Often, at the end of a writing class I am teaching, students ask, "Where do I go from here?" They are asking the same thing.
I've thought a lot about how I've arrived at my group of writing friends and decided to offer my tips on how to create a writers' community as the new incentive for signing up to this newsletter. You might have already noticed the new sign-up box on my blog. Since you all subscribe already, here is the link: How to Build Your Writers' Community
Before I wrap up, my final
shameless self promotion for my online class that starts tomorrow and benefits the Hemingway Foundation: Wishing you a good month of May in writing, hanging
out with (writing) friends and in every other aspect of your life, |
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