A Salon for the Literary Writer

This group is intended as a supportive social group for serious writers who find contact and shop talk with other writers to be more beneficial than workshop and critique. It is intended to support your personal work and is not intended to be used as a networking group for writers seeking work.

Ideally, this group would include a circle of writers who share the same struggles, though they may not share the same style, tone, or genre. Join this group if you are serious about your work and your writing life and would like to spend time with others who feel similarly. Join this group if you are comfortable with your own voice but would be cheered by more comraderie with other writers and heartened by the occasional exchange over dinner on technique. Those who are working on longer works, like novels or critical works, are encouraged to join. The intellectual, arty and obscure are most welcome. Those who write science fiction or fantasy may be more comfortable in one of the numerous Seattle area writers groups that focus on that genre.

Restaurants will be moderately priced; potluck dinner parties may be organized after the group is established.

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NOTE:

Some of the most powerful literature can be some of the most disturbing. Good writing is reflective of the human experience, which does not easily yield to the rating systems that are these days foisted on film and music. A survey of literature shows that the books chosen to be banned and burned often end up, like Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” to not only be worthy of critical note but to be classics.

This group should be like a life art class where attendance is tacit agreement that you’re okay with the nudity of the subject. Don’t come if you’ll be uncomfortable with those who write about and discuss sex, death and the body (the French writer Bataille wrote in one of his volumes that the best minds are preoccupied with sex and death). I won’t support a group where people are made to feel that they should censor themselves because their writing, however well done and powerful, deals with difficult subject matter. This group does not have a G rating. Good writing is not polite.