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.

Then there was me. Let’s just say I didn’t exactly fit in. No one rejected me. In fact, everyone was beyond thoughtful and friendly to me. I was welcomed with wide open arms. But it was awkward. My work was serious. I took myself seriously as a writer. I think that last thing rankled some in the group a little. There was a slight tension every time my turn to read from my work arrived. (And I almost always read.)

My work was dark. And intense. And not politically correct. I had unorthodox, heterodox social and political views. The assumption in 2019 New York City—then as now—was that progressivism is the way forward, hard stop. Discussions in the group were sometimes had, about “cultural appropriation,” about specific language used in a piece, about the right or lack thereof of “white people” to write about “nonwhite people,” etc.

I found the group’s ethos amusing, frustrating and odd. First, besides the longhaired guy, it seemed like very few other people in the group read actual books. That struck me as strange. Wasn’t this a writers’ group? They said they listened to podcasts, streamed videos on YouTube, did TikTok, Twitter, etc. All the social justice positions were, to them, obvious and necessary. When some regular members were going to skip the next meeting due to a BLM protest, it was an obvious given. I began to feel like a freak, an outsider. I didn’t have the right views. To be a contemporary writer, did I have to agree with all their ideas? To me their views seemed binary, overly simplistic, trendy and conformist. There seemed to be no independent thinking in sight. It felt boldly tribal and spiritually vapid.

Of course, to be clear: No one ever actually said anything to me. No one looked at me strange. Most of this chatter came from within my own insecure mind. But I felt it. This pressure, to be like them. Mold myself to their views. Or else keep silent.

Some of my writing included incidents of racism, violence, sexism. In other words: Representations of callous real life. I pushed through. They seemed to get it but not exactly, and not all of them. The young Woke woman didn’t like the way I portrayed women once. I said that I was trying to portray reality, and that reality is often complex, confused, ugly, not what we want. But she felt I should “uplift” women. Was that the job of Art? To present certain characters from certain sectors of society as “good,” others as “bad?” Was that writing? Or propaganda?

There was a definite edge in terms of what felt acceptable and what not. I remember one member laughing when, his having asked me “what I do for work,” and having told him “I’m a writer,” he said, “I wouldn’t advertise that.” This returned me to my earlier feeling: These people do not take themselves seriously. Then I realized there was a whole generation of kids who don’t take themselves seriously. It’s in fact not cool to take yourself seriously. (Except, apparently, when discussing race, gender and politics, three of the most difficult ideas to comprehend, and this with a generation that barely reads!)

Starting with Millennials, the notion of taking oneself seriously, I now grasped, was a revolutionary act. I was in the cultural and psychological minority. Boomers and Gen Xers didn’t take Millnnials or Gen Zers seriously; how could they: These populations didn’t take themselves seriously. The iPhone Generation. The TikTok Generation. The Fake Outrage Generation.

Nevertheless they were good people and I got to know them and I enjoyed taking trains around the city from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Queens, from house to apartment, etc. Some numbers and emails were exchanged. I hung out with a few of them separately from the group. Some of them were strong writers. Sometimes they cherished my pieces, other times they seemed overwhelmed. I couldn’t exactly blame them. Frank liked me but also seemed to see that I was sort of reshaping the group, shifting it slowly from fun and light and jovial to more serious, authentic and writer-y. I think in truth everyone mostly just wanted to get together with other people who enjoyed writing and discuss their latest projects, read some stuff, have some laughs. And that was fine. I was simply intense, needy and insecure by nature. Not to mention demanding and serious.

When Covid happened we moved to Zoom. I stayed on. I wrote about my Harlem experiences and shared them with the group. I think it was hard for some of them to grasp my frustration, being a privileged white man who was, nonetheless, terrified and a minority in Black rough, ravaged East Harlem. I’d been spat at, yelled at, threatened, and chased twice by gangs of teens. Later, two men snuck into my apartment building and held up a tenant at gunpoint. I broke my lease and moved to Lenox Hill on East 70^th between First and York.

Yet I persisted in the writing group. The months dragged on. I always offered helpful, astute feedback to other writers, which they usually seemed to appreciate. And yet I couldn’t shake that outsider feeling. I just didn’t have the right politics. I didn’t use the right language. My pronouns were not listed in my Zoom square. I was supposed to be hyper aware of my privilege as a WSM. But I didn’t feel that way in East Harlem in spring, early summer 2020. I felt scared. And trapped. And in danger. My whole family was in California, across the continent. Flights were cancelled. In May BLM riots broke out after George Floyd. Trump was still in power. It was Manhattan. DeBlasio and Cuomo fought daily on TV like drunken lions. Everything was slow, like thick honey sludging down a tree, swallowing everything in its way.

And so, at a certain point I skipped a meeting. Then another. And another. The weeks blurred by. I planned a trip to California in June, 2021. I left then, not yet knowing I wouldn’t return. Dad would be diagnosed with stage four Melanoma. I’d stay in Santa Barbara, where my folks had moved mid-Pandemic. And my life would go from there.

I emailed with Frank a little, after that, and with the longhaired dude. I added them to my Substack subscriber list. They stuck around for a while but then both fell off over time. That was okay. It didn’t matter. The group now stands out in my memory as representing a certain time and place. New York City, just before and then during the opening year of Covid. They were good, fine, quality people. They were nice to me. I just never fully fit in. But I’ve never fully fit in anywhere. I’m always the square peg in the round hole. Just my nature. And I had to know, of course, that any creative group in The Big Apple during Trump’s reign was going to be far left progressive. Politics had been infesting the waters of Art for years by that point. It wasn’t a surprise or anything. I just felt taken aback, I suppose, by the lack of seriousness. But that’s also probably largely my own fault. As I said: I’ve always taken myself too seriously. A flaw in the system. I get it from my father, probably. Both parents, maybe.

Anyway. I don’t think a writer “needs” a writing group. Or an MFA, for that matter. Life experience and innate talent, coupled with drive and ambition, are the keys. But if you want to spend time with others who do the freakish dance of putting pen to sacred paper, you might just consider giving a group a try.

You’re probably a much easier fit than I am.