Dear Friends and Family,

One of the things I’m happiest about this year has been co-hosting a Zoom writing meet-up with my friend, Wendy. We began ours in April after the pandemic shut-down under the auspices of the artist community where we met. I used to host Fridays 2:00 PM and Wendy hosted 3:00 PM on Saturdays. It gave us some structure, accountability, a time when we knew we would work on writing. Then the days got warmer and fewer folks wanted to be at the computer on the weekend. In July, Wendy and I were preparing to teach in the virtual residency for the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA at Pacific Lutheran University, joining the core MFA faculty for the first time.

After the residency was over in mid-August, we were energized and exhausted (10-hour Zoom days for 10 days was exhausting; the community was energizing). We had a few weeks before Wendy’s semester and my virtual book tour for This Is One Way to Dance, visiting university reading series, college classrooms, book clubs, bookstores. I spent fifteen years teaching college students and had been looking forward to this part of publishing a book: being in conversation with students and professors. I also had a long-delayed dental surgery and began working with my two MFA students remotely; they send a packet several times a year; I read, make comments and notes, write a letter, meet with them by Zoom.

At some point, I realized both in this group and other groups I’ve been part of that I needed a shared buy-in for it to continue. In organizations and families some people do the heavy lifting of a certain kind of work: the organizing, the keeping things-going, the mental list of what’s going to run out of the fridge. Often these people are women. Wendy is teaching full-time and I had a full plate of virtual book events and admin, university residencies, new work, health issues, and mostly, the desire to set up shared hosting. I knew I did not have the bandwidth nor the desire to be one of two hosting.

I talked about this with Kirin & R and based on their conversations and advice, set up a Google Doc like R had done for the “snack sign-up sheet” for when he was coaching tennis. You had to sign up and maybe there was a second person in charge if the first person fell through, but it was a self-sustaining system. What I had noticed is that some people volunteer, some people never volunteer but come, continue to benefit, and some people don’t think about it. As long as it’s going, they appreciate it, but are not part of sustaining the community. And I realized that I didn’t want to be part of a system that wasn’t recognizing it as labor and sharing it.

I’m really happy to say that it’s been working. We broadened our original meetup beyond Blue Mountain Center, our first community, and brought in friends we knew from our other places whom we knew and trusted to make our own gathering of people who wanted creative community, shared accountability, a virtual gathering place, co-working. I met Katie B. from our BMC group when it was just BMC and she and I also co-worked on other days during some of the hardest pre-book months of the pandemic. It was a life-saver.

I know there have been other communities doing this regularly. Friday writing group has meant I’ve seen writer friends and met people new to me on some Fridays. It meant that when I had dental surgery, the meetup carried on without me and I didn’t fret or need to send out an email. Last week, I invited Celeste to join (I had just visited her creative writing class via Zoom last Friday) and she came again this Friday. It was so good to get to see her and hear what she’s working on.

Inch by inch, step by step, we move forward.

This Friday, Holly hosted and shared a poem by Louise Glück (“The Night Migrations”). It was lovely. It was a virtual coffee shop, a gathering, a way for our friends to meet one another.

New Writing:

“Zoom Indian dance classes Lifted the Heaviness I’d Been Carrying” in The Guardian about dancing through the pandemic with Rathna Kumar, my long-ago dance teacher. She lost her son, Kedaar, in February. You can read more about him here. If you are so inclined, you can contribute Kedaar Kumar’s Scholarship Fund: Donate here.

New interview with me by writer Sayantani Dasgupta in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.

Upcoming Events:

Saint John Fisher Cavanaugh Lecture on Thursday, October 22 at 7:00 PM EDT. Register ahead of time for the Zoom link to the reading.

What I’m Reading:

The Art of Slow Writing by Louise de Salvo, recommended to me by both Geeta and Wendy, different years.
The Business of Being a Writer, Jane Friedman

Gratitude:

Jim Foley and his friends and family. Doing the 5K walk with my friend Sarah, her kids, and R. You can make a donation to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation here.

What’s something that made you happy this month?

We went on a drive last week to Naples/Bristol, New York and bought pies from Monica’s Pies including two for friends. This photo is from my visit to Geneva, New York last week, to see my friend Kirin.

I got to thank Michele Morano for her words, which helped me finish an essay for my book, and to hear her and Joanna Eleftheriou read from their books and hear Karen Babine’s smart questions about the essay form at a panel we did at the Chicago Public Library. You can watch the recording here.

I hope this finds you well. Do write with news.

Warmly,

Sejal

This newsletter was originally sent out on October 19, 2020. You can subscribe here or view the full archive here.