I have a writing group that I started specifically so writers could spend some hours in each other’s company. We’d write in silence for an hour, stop for tea and chat, and then write for another hour if that suited everyone.
I loved every moment of facilitating those groups, and I got some really excellent writing done in those times, along with making treasured new friends. I had a modest private group on Facebook that supported everyone inbetween the writing groups with announcements of writing competitions. All was going well until the Age of C19 was upon us, and writers retreated to their garrets again.
So the writing group went online, and the decision to go online in full was sealed when I went to see my sister, and one of her housemates was a writer. I invited her to join me in a long-running online writing group - The Writing Race by the Australian Writer’s Marketplace.
It was lovely to sit on the sofa, participate in a Writing Race, and hear the steady tap of another writer’s keyboard. Most satisfying was the finished word count for both of us, and the feeling of having shared something with the outside world, while we were being responsibly distant.
So I decided to change my Salon of Sociability into a Salon of Social Distance, suddenly becoming the salon at the end of the empire. For what else is a group of great writers to do but keep documenting the death throes of one way of living, and the birth of new ideas, in this time of corona?
I wish these times were not paid for in death, I wish we were suffering any other upheaval than that of insidious disease, but these are the times we have now, and looking away is not the way writing serves the world.
So now I run my writing hour more frequently, and I take time to point people towards other writers documenting how these times unfold.
Right now, might I recommend Marisa Garreffa’s reportage from the heart of the Italian Lockdown.
I loved every moment of facilitating those groups, and I got some really excellent writing done in those times, along with making treasured new friends. I had a modest private group on Facebook that supported everyone inbetween the writing groups with announcements of writing competitions. All was going well until the Age of C19 was upon us, and writers retreated to their garrets again.
So the writing group went online, and the decision to go online in full was sealed when I went to see my sister, and one of her housemates was a writer. I invited her to join me in a long-running online writing group - The Writing Race by the Australian Writer’s Marketplace.
It was lovely to sit on the sofa, participate in a Writing Race, and hear the steady tap of another writer’s keyboard. Most satisfying was the finished word count for both of us, and the feeling of having shared something with the outside world, while we were being responsibly distant.
So I decided to change my Salon of Sociability into a Salon of Social Distance, suddenly becoming the salon at the end of the empire. For what else is a group of great writers to do but keep documenting the death throes of one way of living, and the birth of new ideas, in this time of corona?
I wish these times were not paid for in death, I wish we were suffering any other upheaval than that of insidious disease, but these are the times we have now, and looking away is not the way writing serves the world.
So now I run my writing hour more frequently, and I take time to point people towards other writers documenting how these times unfold.
Right now, might I recommend Marisa Garreffa’s reportage from the heart of the Italian Lockdown.
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