The Many Different Kinds of Writers Groups

RITING is a solitary act. As a writer, you’ve likely heard, or possibly even said, some version of this statement to explain the process of sitting alone at a desk, figuring out how to translate what’s in your mind onto a screen or paper. If you flip to the last pages of any book, however, there is almost always an acknowledgements page filled with a list of fellow writers to whom the author is grateful for reading early drafts and offering support and advice along the way. Evidence there is a community behind those printed words. Consider the famous literary circles in history such as the writers of Stratford-on-Odéon, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, who frequently met at Adrienne Monnier’s la Maison des Amis des Livres and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris to discuss their work and share ideas. Or the South Side Writers Group in Chicago, with members such as Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Fenton