There’s a book by Meg Waite Clayton—the Wednesday Sisters. It’s about a group of housewives in Palo Alto in the late 60’s who bond together over a love of reading and a secret love for writing.
My group is the Tuesday Sisters. Because we meet on Tuesday. At first it was just me and my writing partner Rachel, and then I invited Jill (because I kept running into Jill—at Bittersweet, at Trader Joe’s, walking down the street. It kind of looked like we were stalking each other, we gave each other the benefit of the doubt.). I think Angelisa came next. And six months ago, Mary joined us. (Kara introduced us via Facebook.) For a brief moment we had a fifth, Jessica, but she moved to the East Coast in last winter.
My Tuesday Sisters are awesome. We’ve been meeting for over a year now. We write together every Tuesday from 9:30 to 11:30. During the summer we met when we could—sometimes on Wednesdays, sometimes on Thursdays, kids in the other room—however we could manage it. Rachel and Jill both had babies in the spring, and they just brought the babies with them. Sometimes Angelisa would have her toddler and preschooler with her. Once we met to write and had seven kids between four of moms. And yes, we did get writing done.
This is how it works: we spend about twenty minutes saying hello, chatting, catching up. Then Rachel pulls out the prompts and we write. I keep time, although I often forget. When the timer goes off, we read what we’ve written. There’s no comment. Then we go on to the next prompt. Ninety minutes later we pull out our calendars and decide who will host the following Tuesday.
Some of us are working on novels, others on memoirs. Sometimes I just write about what’s not working in my writing.
The goal is to write without judgment. It’s based on a writing meet-up that I go to in the city at Cafe La Boheme with Cary Tennis. He got the idea from Alice Wu. She got the idea from two guys in Seattle and it has been mentioned that the idea might have originated with Natalie Goldberg.
What happens between the Tuesday Sisters stays between the Tuesday Sisters, but I can tell you the: when we’re chatting, we tend to hem and haw about what we’re writing or how we’re writing. But when we sit down to write, we hash it out and belt it out. And then we soar through the week on the momentum we’ve created.
Indiegogo Update: The Write On, Mamas! have raised $3240 in our first week of crowdfunding! Twenty-seven more days at $11,760 more to raise. I've pledged to write a blog post for every day of the campaign. And if you donate, I'll write a blog post about you! Click here to help us out!
Indiegogo Update: The Write On, Mamas! have raised $3240 in our first week of crowdfunding! Twenty-seven more days at $11,760 more to raise. I've pledged to write a blog post for every day of the campaign. And if you donate, I'll write a blog post about you! Click here to help us out!
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