Remaking a Writing Workshop

New York City’s Writing World

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

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I sorta hate groups. I’m too much of a [precious] individual. Too selfish. Too self-driven. Too independent-thinking. Too real, too raw, too myself.

And yet, I’ve sometimes found myself in groups. Usually writing ones. In Oakland, California, in 2012—two years sober and freshly back from Portland, Ore—I joined a writing workshop of six people at a semi-famous poet’s house on 44^th Street near Telegraph Ave. It was weird, annoying and profoundly helpful. It didn’t make me the writer I am today, but it helped me find my literary voice. I ended up getting my first story published in a magazine based on feedback I received from that group. Not bad.

Seven years later—in 2019—after getting my BA in writing, interning with a literary agent, starting a website, writing a blog, getting into book editing, writing several novels, having a dozen or so stories published in little magazines, I fled the Bay Area for New York City. I was one year out of a long-term relationship, ready to take on the city with all the fervor and rage of a self-appointed scribbler of prose.

As we all know, come March of 2020 everything would literally shut down. I wrote about my Covid experience HERE, the insanity of East Harlem in those first lockdown months. But prior to that I had exactly 12 months to see, write, explore, and play in Manhattan. I lived in four different apartments in 2.3 years. I saw a lot. Wrote a lot.

Going back to 2019. I joined a writer’s group. I hesitate to say writing “workshop” since the group was very relaxed and the main idea seemed to be less critiquing each other’s work than praising it constantly. Were I to give you the name of the group it would make a lot more sense. But the name shall remain unsaid. It was a great group of people, honestly. They met twice a month, roughly, at a different member’s house each time.

Sometimes we gathered at the leader’s place, the guy who’d started the group and had been running it for almost 20 years by then. He came from a notorious literary family in the city who owned a famous NYC bookstore. He was a writer himself and had several books published with major publishers. I’ll call him Frank. *(Not his real name.) His place was way up on the 30^th floor of some high rise in the Upper West Side. Every square inch of space was literally covered in magazine cutouts, posters, etc. I loved it. Floor to ceiling windows gave us a view of some buildings on the backside. Frank was in his late 40s but seemed 35. He was handsome, tall, lithe, bald, and very thoughtful, not to mention in possession of a sharp mind and witty writing style.

The group was of an expanding and contracting nature, but there was a core group of say 15 of us who basically always came. An affable, heavyset long-haired dude who always reminded me of an intellectual Jack Black but with red hair. He kept reading sections of his comedic familial epic-novel. He had us laughing, in stitches. There was a young late twenties gay guy who was writing a murder mystery. A 23-year-old woman from North Carolina originally who was Woke as Woke can be, and also very nice and kind. Theatre kids in their twenties. A gray-haired older man in his sixties with a thick silver beard who read us clips of his Civil War-era novel. (Incredible.) A depressed woman in her mid-thirties who always overshared. Briefly a woman who looked like Bob Dylan attended, and she might have been crazy.