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Writing is a solitary activity. As a writer, I spend a lot of time with myself and my laptop. This is sometimes fine, or even better than fine, depending on my mood. Other times, it just feels lonely.
I’m lucky to have the very best antidote to this loneliness: wonderful writing friends. They’ve popped up over the years in different seasons, and some have morphed into friend-friends.
About ten years ago (Where has the time gone? How did I get so old?) I was invited to a writing group. My first time attending, I hosted in my new studio on West 95th Street. (They took turns hosting, and I felt like I might as well have some people over to christen my brand-new place.) The other members, who had already been meeting, told me they usually ate pizza, so I ordered my favorite pies from Two Boots and picked up a few bottles of wine. We had exchanged work in the days before, and we spent some of the night talking about our writing (for me, very early essays that would become a part of my first book Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen) and most of the night talking about weird dates, apartments, awful bosses, and other life things. We were all ambitious, in our early 20s, and ready to take on NYC and the world.
Since then, the group morphed into new incarnations. One of the members lost touch with us and became famous (famous-ish, maybe). We talked about writing, but we also gossiped and prepared for job interviews and agonized over big decisions. We grew up. The weird dates made way to actually good dates, and we all attended each other’s weddings. We had babies. We got big promotions and landed big, fancy jobs. (Not me, I became a freelancer, although I’ve had some fancy moments myself.) Some of us moved to the suburbs. Some of us took long hiatuses from writing. Some of us wrote more than ever.
This group doesn’t exchange writing anymore, although they’ll always be my original writing group friends, and we have the best text thread about mom life and life-life. I’ve had other writers’ groups since then, ones that popped up and then faded out as life got in the way. Structured groups with written guidelines and casual meetups where anyone could bring in any genre of work at any moment.
In addition to the friendship aspect, it’s been invaluable to have people who care about words/writing/reading as readers for my work, to have feedback from people who get it, and to have accountability when I’m finding it excruciating to put my butt in the seat and words on the page. It’s wonderful to have a safe space to share early drafts that are a hodgepodge of half-formed ideas, to have smart people ask the right questions and hold my hand until they slowly transform into somewhat actualized ideas.
Getting my MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars was like going to a sort of the zenith of all writers’ groups. There were many things to love, from the bucolic Vermont landscape to the generous faculty to lectures about topics I didn’t even know were topics, but the best part was the people, some of whom became wonderful writer friends and then friend-friends.
People to text when everything feels awesome and when everything feels catastrophic and all the many spaces in-between.
People to send a few pages and ask them if there’s any there there.
People to trust when they tell you.
People to give you a pep talk when you need it most.
People to come to your events even when the world is so over Zoom.
People to thank in your acknowledgements.
People to thank every day.
The very best sort of people.