About us
Hi there! We're Difficult Friends, a community-run arts & humanities club: Website ⟡ Instagram ⟡ Venmo
We empower Austinites to tackle Difficult ideas and projects.
Our core values are:
- creative growth,
- intellectual challenge,
- human connection, and
- civic imagination.
Our events are designed as intellectual workouts! And creative experiments! We host workshops and discussions that push Austin residents to think harder thoughts, make cooler stuff, and connect more deeply across their human differences.
This is not an organization for the faint of heart. As our name suggests, we take pride in being Difficult Friends and in confronting Difficult challenges.
Meaning is Difficult! Embrace the Difficult!
Difficult Friends just launched in April 2026! So we're very excited to see all of y'all here. Welcome to this new group!
Our Philosophy of Friendship
There are things that can only happen between people really being themselves with each other.
Not performing, not managing, not carefully calibrating what they show.
Wholehearted creative collaboration is one of them. Real intellectual encounter is another. The kind of friendship that actually sustains people through difficulty is a third.
We think it’s good to be a Difficult Friend.
Friendship itself is difficult to the degree that it is both genuine and built across difference. You will find our events creatively and intellectually challenging. They will put you in touch with people in ways that are energizing but unfamiliar.
But Difficult Friends are friends worth having.
And please consider donating to us through Venmo or our Meetup page. It really makes a difference.
Statement of Welcome & Inclusivity
We believe everybody can be Difficult. ;-)
Difficult Friends is an inclusive community space, and we particularly seek to protect and welcome our LGBTQIA+, queer, transgender, and nonbinary members. Event attendees may be asked to share their preferred pronouns and will be asked to respect the preferred pronouns shared by other participants. Women, immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent folks seeking a diverse community are also especially encouraged to attend!
That said, no particular identity performance is needed, desired, or expected from our Difficult Friends. Come as you are and know you have a seat at our table, no matter how life has brought you into our community.
Our Unique Session-Based Structure
Difficult Friends is a group designed to incubate close creative & intellectual friendships. We run themed short-term and long-term sessions featuring outings, workshops, and discussions connected by a core concept.
It’s like a semester-long class, but shorter (or in some cases, much longer)!
However, each our events is also able to stand on its own! So you should feel free to come by whenever, regardless of your attendance at prior events. We welcome first-timers always. Members are also free to drop in and out of Difficult Friends. We encourage everyone to feel a sense of freedom and lightness while doing as much or as little with the group as they please.
In the interest of being Difficult, we also reserve the right to host occasional random one-off events just for funsies!
Upcoming events
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ANALYZE THIS: We Refugees by Hannah Arendt ⟡ Essay Discussion
Central Market, 4001 N Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX, USAnalyze This is a highly philosophical social club that brings nerds together to discuss interesting topics (interesting to us, at least)!
As our names might suggest, we at Analyze This and Difficult Friends love overthinkers!
In reading and talking through big ideas together, we hope to deepen our shared capacity for textual and critical analysis. Come read with us to sharpen your intellectual skills and learn how to better argue, debate, and disagree! We don't mind a little contrarianism ;-)
This week, we're reading and discussing the essay:
We Refugees by Hannah Arendt
"In the first place, we don’t like to be called 'refugees.' We ourselves call each other 'newcomers' or 'immigrants'... We try the best we can to fit into a world where you have to be sort of politically minded when you buy your food.'"
Originally published in a small Jewish journal called Menorah, Hannah Arendt's 1943 essay asks what price we pay to belong in society—and at what point modern political life renders belonging impossible.
Her essay combines emotional depth with intense analytical rigor. As in her better known works, The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt refuses to treat belonging here as private or psychological. For her, it is always juridical and political: a question of what frameworks recognize you, what rights follow that recognition, and what happens to you—and your people—when those frameworks collapse.
Read "We Refugees" by Hannah Arendt for free here.
Our Monthly Theme for May: Belonging
Every 1-3 months, our group chooses a special theme to explore in our events. This writing workshop is part of our May session on "Belonging." What does it mean to belong? How do you know when you belong? And how do social systems and governance structures shape our sense of communal belonging? Those are some of the questions we hope to investigate this month, while offering Austinites intellectual harbor in our own arts & humanities community.
About Us
This group is a project by Difficult Friends, a community-run arts & humanities club: Website ⟡ Instagram
We empower Austinites to tackle Difficult ideas and projects.
Our core values are:- creative growth,
- intellectual challenge,
- human connection, and
- civic imagination.
Our events are designed as fun intellectual workouts and creative experiments. We host workshops and discussions that push Austin residents to think harder thoughts, make cooler stuff, and connect more deeply across their human differences.
This is not an organization for the faint of heart. As our name suggests, we take pride in being Difficult Friends and in confronting Difficult challenges.
Meaning is Difficult! Embrace the Difficult!
About Me
I'm a writer and photographer living in Austin with my dog, Cookie. You can find out more about me and my work here: https://rachelsummercheong.com
I've been busy working on my first novel, but I hope to get around to doing more with Substack this summer as well. https://substack.com/@rachelsummercheong
— Rachel
Statement of Welcome & Inclusivity
Here at Difficult Friends, we believe everybody can be Difficult. ;-)
Difficult Friends is an inclusive community space, and we particularly seek to protect and welcome our LGBTQIA+, queer, transgender, and nonbinary members. Event attendees may be asked to share their preferred pronouns and will be asked to respect the preferred pronouns shared by other participants. Women, immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent folks seeking a diverse community are also especially encouraged to attend!
That said, to quote the progressive labor activist Maurice Mitchell, we do not accept “using one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, ‘As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.’ What’s implied is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse—dismissed.
To be clear, personal identity and individual experience are important. And while it is true that the ‘personal is political,’ the personal cannot trump strategy nor should it overwhelm the collective interest. Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position... One’s racial or gender identity, sex, or membership in any marginalized community is, in and of itself, insufficient information to position someone in leadership or mandate that their perspective be adopted.
People with marginal identities, as human beings, suffer all the frailties, inconsistencies, and failings of any other human. Genuflecting to individuals solely based on their socialized identities or personal stories deprives them of the conditions that sharpen arguments, develop skills, and win debates. We infantilize members of historically marginalized or oppressed groups by seeking to placate or pander instead of being in a right relationship, which requires struggle, debate, disagreement, and hard work. This type of false solidarity is a form of charity that weakens the individual and the collective. Finding authentic alignment and solidarity among diverse voices is serious labor. After all, ‘steel sharpens steel.’”
For a concise summary of my views re: identitarian politics as this meetup’s lead organizer, feel free to refer to his excellent article Building Resilient Organizations.
Photography Policy
The event organizers of this meetup may take photos or videos of our events. By attending this event, you consent to being filmed and photographed. (If it’s Rachel, don’t worry - she will airbrush any blemishes & imperfections xoxo)!13 attendees
Beginner-Friendly Writing Workshop ⟡ Lost in Translation ⟡ All Languages ✅🌎🌍🌏
Central Market - North, 4001 N. Lamar Blvd., Austin, TX, USWelcome to READ—WRITE—REMIX: a reading club + creative writing workshop + social hour! We read an interesting article, poem, or story, talk about it together, and write about it for 15 minutes. We then "remix" our thoughts by discussing anything we want to share. Then we write for another 15! And after that, we just hang out and chat ☺️🫶🏼📝
In this way, we come to deepen our understanding of the text, ourselves, and each other.
Note that this is an open language workshop. The discussion components will be in English, but participants are welcome to write in any language 📝🌎🌏🌍
Our Monthly Theme for May: Belonging
Every 1-3 months, our group chooses a special theme to explore in our events. This writing workshop is part of our May session on "Belonging." What does it mean to belong? How do you know when you belong? And how does language shape our sense of belonging? Those are some of the questions we hope to investigate this month, while offering Austinites a creative home in our own arts & humanities community.
This Week's Theme: Failures of Belonging ⟡ Translation & Mistranslation
"I need someone with whom I can struggle, and fail." — Jhumpa Lahiri, this week's featured writer
Feeling a bit lost in translation? Us too! In this all-levels creative writing workshop, we'll touch on:
- failures of belonging & their generative relationship to creativity
- the struggle to locate oneself & the search for a narrative voice
- the complexities of travel, relocation, immigration, identity in a global world, etc. Emphasis on the etc.!
This week, we'll also be be thinking about translation, mistranslation, and how we learn to speak. So immigrants and ESL speakers are particularly welcome and encouraged to come hang!
Workshop Reading: Teach Yourself Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri
For the discussion component of our workshop, we'll be reading Teach Yourself Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. She's a British-American writer and the daughter of Bengali immigrants who later immigrated herself to Italy - and started writing novels in Italian. The essay is quite short (9 pages), but very thought-provoking!
Please read this essay in advance and come to our workshop prepared to have a casual chat about it.
A free link to the reading is provided below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Orcy8Y8Lt_SHIp2nwe3Qm5-a2E9MHAcxGTnV1FwPvwQ/edit?usp=sharing
READ—WRITE—REMIX ⟡ Workshop Structure
We'll be meeting at Central Market on North Lamar at 7 PM on Thursday, May 14. Mostly likely, we'll be on the upstairs patio which you can get to by going through the inside cafe stairs. Look for our signs on the table!
Our workshop structure will be roughly as follows:
- Saying hello (names, introductions, pronouns)
- Discussing the workshop reading
- Free writing time [15 minutes]
- Sharing a couple of thoughts from your writing block
- Free writing time [15 minutes]
- Sharing final thoughts in a big group
- Optional post-event hang
Thank you in advance for contributing your unique perspective to our workshop! Whether you’re just starting to explore your own creativity or you’ve been committed to it for decades, we hope you’ll join us in welcoming all of our workshop writers in a spirit of vigorous encouragement, thoughtful engagement, and empathetic open-heartedness.
About Us
This group is a project by Difficult Friends, a community-run arts & humanities club: Website ⟡ Instagram
We empower Austinites to tackle Difficult ideas and projects.
Our core values are:- creative growth,
- intellectual challenge,
- human connection, and
- civic imagination.
Our events are designed as intellectual workouts and creative experiments. We host workshops and discussions that push Austin residents to think harder thoughts, make cooler stuff, and connect more deeply across their human differences.
This is not an organization for the faint of heart. As our name suggests, we take pride in being Difficult Friends and in confronting Difficult challenges.
Meaning is Difficult! Embrace the Difficult!
About Me
I'm a writer and photographer living in Austin with my dog, Cookie. You can find out more about me and my work here: https://rachelsummercheong.com
I've been busy working on my first novel, but I hope to get around to doing more with Substack this summer as well. https://substack.com/@rachelsummercheong
— Rachel
Statement of Welcome & Inclusivity
Here at Difficult Friends, we believe everybody can be Difficult. ;-)
Difficult Friends is an inclusive community space, and we particularly seek to protect and welcome our LGBTQIA+, queer, transgender, and nonbinary members. Event attendees may be asked to share their preferred pronouns and will be asked to respect the preferred pronouns shared by other participants. Women, immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent folks seeking a diverse community are also especially encouraged to attend!
That said, no particular identity performance is needed, desired, or expected from our Difficult Friends. Come as you are and know you have a seat at our table, no matter how life has brought you into our community.
Photography Policy
The event organizers of this meetup may take photos or videos of our events. By attending this event, you consent to being filmed and photographed. (If it’s Rachel, don’t worry - she will airbrush any blemishes & imperfections xoxo)!14 attendees
Past events
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