Our writing group, The Writing Room CLE, meets twice a month, at Common Grounds Coffee and at the Collinwood Branch of the Cleveland Public Library. Our group is slightly different from others, in that instead of being focused on creation or critique, we work to support creatives professionally and personally. We offer each other opportunities, share our successes and challenges, and then provide prompts and time for writing, sharing, and feedback. Here are a few sample notes from a meeting:
Successes
One of our members performed at her first-ever open mic, at Bookhouse Brewing.
Congratulations on your braverism! We hope to see you there sometime!
One of our members has a book coming out; stay tuned for the preorder page.
Strong Women Bond Together was Saturday night and several of our members attended and performed in support of this fundraiser for Genesis House.
Opportunities
EF Schraeder is teaching a class through Lit Cleveland at Loganberry Books. Register here and show up for a primer on horror.
Maelstrom Collaborative posted a call for submissions, and several of our members are applying.
Tin House has an excellent faculty this year and they offer scholarships.
Pigeon Pages is open to submissions.
AWP offers a mentorship program called Writer to Writer, which includes free admission to AWP for life. Our member Kianna recommends the program; watch this space for announcement of their spring application date.
The Reading Room CLE is looking for prints and chapbooks from your backlist. See our submission guidelines here.
Challenges
Many of us struggle with the physical challenges of sustained computer work. Here is an article of writing advice, including Margaret Atwood's thoughts on back pain; here are some exercises from Katie Norris of Recourse Coaching, a body-positive health coaching practice. Here is Kristen Cashore’s experience with adaptive software. There is a local body-positive yoga teacher named Lynn Rodemann who is very talented at welcoming all sorts of bodies into a space of healing; check her out!
PromptS
1) What are the things you have ignored, in order to do your job? This 33-year Army veteran came to the Senate to testify about post-deployment healthcare, and a Senator called her pretty; she ignored it and still testified. What are the things you have ignored, from professional or personal relationships, that should by all rights have been dealbreakers, but you went ahead and did the work, served the meal, or dated the person anyway? Why did you do that? What would it have looked like, in an ideal world?
2) The news coverage of Joker has been quite interesting; its director has notoriously said that “woke culture” has ruined humor. Marc Maron’s commentary, here, is that if you can’t write a joke without hurting people, you are probably bad at your job and should consider professional development. But here is Elizabeth Warren, telling a mean joke for an excellent purpose…so. When is a hurtful joke funny? When was the last time you laughed at a hurtful joke? Can you write a story about a hurtful joke? It’s interesting to look at the nexus between humiliation and humor and pain and humor and when it works and when it doesn’t.
Feedback
Our feedback time is modeled on the Critical Response Process. We invite but do not require sharing, and we ask the creator to tell the group what sort of feedback, if any, they would like.
Bookseller's Commentary
Many of our members used words like “low-productivity” or “nongenerative” this week. I tend to prefer the word “fallow,” rather than “non-creative,” because those times of low production can be good and healthy, just resting, like a field that’s laying unplanted, being rained on and building up nitrogen. But also, how long is too long to rest? When does resting become hiding?
Many people operate under the assumption that writing is a daily habit like going to work. If you don’t do your twenty minutes of writing, you won’t ever succeed. If you’re interested in working with writers who write as a daily practice, I invite you to sign up for NaNoWriMo, which takes place in November and is a community festival of writing with in-person and online writing meetups all over the world. We will be hosting meetups through The Reading Room CLE, and so will our colleagues in bookstores and libraries all over Greater Cleveland. Next week, the Skirball Center will host a panel discussion of NaNoWriMo participants; our co-Municipal Liaison Stacey Clemence will be speaking, along with Kit Willihnganz of Belonging Books and other local writers. We’d love to see you at one of these group writing sessions.
But! Many novels are produced in three to six weeks of sustained productivity, after a longer period of thought and/or outlining or research; here is an interview with one of my favorite novelists, who often writes that way. Note: SRB started writing novels when she was five years old, one a year for twenty years, until and the twenty-first novel was published. (The first one was about ninja ponies and I cannot WAIT for the edition of her juvenilia to come out in 2145 when literary scholars of the future are digging through her archive). We also discussed a Jesuit priest who had writer’s block until he was 45; he struggled through school, struggled through the novitiate, struggled through grad school and his thesis and his dissertation and then POW, at 45 it broke and he wrote 85 more publications in the next 20 years.
It’s never too late and never too early to start writing. The Writing Room CLE is open to new members; show up some Saturday with your laptop or your notebook, and join us.