This both terrifies and excites me. I joined a writers group in my 40’s when I was separating from my husband of 20 years. It felt like a life line, gave voice to my suffering, which slowly over time gave birth to a new beginning. I would welcome this into my life yet again. It has been 20 years.

Love the way that community grows out of just listening to each others raw unpolished stories. Imagine doing this very Monday for years… love it.

This is so beautiful! I want to get in on these writing workshops. What a gift.

At the end of the piece the author, apprehensive and dry-mouthed, looks up; now it is time for the other workshop members to respond to what they’ve just heard. The responses are only allowed to be positive: what works, what’s beautiful, what’s memorable. And the strange thing about this guideline—which sounds at first suspiciously saccharine—is that it ends up functioning less as a restraint on all the sophisticated, MFA-ish critiques that are endemic to writing workshops than as a lens through which such critiques seem absurdly beside the point. A man who hasn’t written in years lovingly recites a list of the foods he likes to eat on his birthday. Listening to him, aware that your job is to see the beauty in his words, not to think how he could give his list a three-act structure, you end up really seeing the beauty.

Esoterically <<< Writes >>> Within >>> Grand Central Plaza’s Preservation Society this a.m.