Dear members of old writing groups,
I regret that I haven’t reached out in a while. Since we were last writing together, coming from our disparate lives weekly or monthly to discuss our writing, much has changed. Only one of you has gotten moderately famous with your writing. I see the rest of us still posting in our various social media, the choice indicative of where we are in life. I see you, Michael, posting on [redacted] about AI in education, and I see you, Kayla, on [redacted] with photos of great drinks and inventive meals. I don’t know if you’re still writing. In all those months that we were talking about writing, we never got into the motivation of it, why we felt compelled to string words together so that someone could read it and capture an idea that we had. What drove us to be so enthralled with what we wrote? And also: what drove us to need another human being to grok the ideas that we thought those words hinted at?
The thing that I miss from our sessions together (other than it meant I was writing) was the recommendations. While we shared very little about ourselves in terms of personal history (well, Mia, you and I did get deep into our backgrounds in our tipsy subway rides after the meetings), we did reveal our tastes and preferences. Kayla, you introduced me to the TV show [redacted], a show that I didn’t even watch until the pandemic, shaking my head at why I resisted TV this good for so long. Michael, you introduced me to some great science fiction writers (as well as Miguel who I met up with in Bogota and who tried to help me find a job when I was trying to live there). And then there were the articles! I believe it was from someone in this group that I brought back articles about hipsters and emerging adulthood. The recommendations from youse guys was how I came to trust you as critics. I trusted your taste and thus your feedback on how to improve my writing and myself, in part. I hope that I was able to introduce you to things that brought you wonder and joy and deepened your understanding of the world we live in.
While I am no longer writing—rather, the writing that I am doing is in service to a business that I am starting—I hope that you don’t mind if I, after this long silence, offer a recommendation.
Perhaps you are still writing and perhaps you’ve been published, though not to the fame that [redacted] has achieved. Or perhaps whatever was driving you to write was a wound that you’ve healed over time. But I think our greatest gifts, collectively, wasn’t the production, but the reading and the interpretation, the excavation of meanings in others’ words. I hope you are still doing that, with people you care about.
And if you are not, I hope you don’t mind my unsolicited recommendation: do it, but do it in a group chat.
If you are not a part of a group chat, and need some convincing, all I can say is that a good group chat is as vibrant as the discussions we would have about each others’ writings and about our recommendations. And if you are a part of a group chat and you hate it, well, that’s probably because it’s on SMS and it’s your family of birth trying to organize gatherings. (I have one of those, too, and it’s awful; I tried to get them to do a google sheet for their shit, and the organizer—my big sister—said that she liked it this way. I think they started a new chat without me and now I’m not invited to things anymore.)
Get yourself a group chat on an encrypted messaging service (Whatsapp and Signal are two that I have) that allows people to leave the chat and also mute the chat for periods of time. Either try to reconnect with people from another time in your life (your old hagwon coworkers, or the people you lived with in a flophouse at 22) or mix some people from various times based on common interests you had—cooking, surfing, traveling—and share some stuff with them, and ask them how they are. On a regular basis.
Hopefully they will share with you. Hopefully they will share what they are reading and what news is heartbreaking or worrisome or uplifting. Or what is making them laugh or news about the people they care about it. And you can be there, across the distances as a witness but also a demonstration of how to care for people. You can both affirm their consternation or pride and push at those feelings as well.
You were all so good at pushing me to be better through your gentle questions and your honest perspectives in our writing groups. I know there are people in your life outside of whatever you’re doing for money that might appreciate it. I think they need it in writing. They also need to learn from someone what tone is and the difference between implication and inference. They probably intuit these things, but how rarely is the implicated and hinted at made explicit. They also need someone who can be patient with them and the other responsibilities and concerns they have. They need the time that writing gives to consider and reconsider. I think a good group chat gives people that.
I hope you’ve already got a good group chat. I hope you’ve got several. I hope you send each other memes, but also complain about local sports and maybe you even get into politics a little bit—not the big national or international stuff, just the annoying stuff, like your local councilman going on a leave of absence for addiction right before a legal claim about him having an affair with a junior employee comes out or how a college football team that received senatorial intervention to make it to the play offs got creamed in the one game they played. Or broken elevators on a commuter train platform that serves as the closest stop to a local hospital. Or how fishing licenses are no longer calendar year, but a rolling year from the date purchased in your state. Or how your employer insists on you coming to work five days a week, but doesn’t have onsite charging for an electric car and isn’t near public transportation routes. The small annoyances need witnesses, and irritation needs coaching to grow from complaints to action.
If nothing else, get into a group chat with me. Maybe I can be those things to you.
Cheers,
Auxie Ekster