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Creative Writing San Francisco

Explore Creative Writing Groups and Events in San Francisco

The Lives We Almost Lived: A Poetry Gathering on Choice, Chance, and Possibility

The Lives We Almost Lived: A Poetry Gathering on Choice, Chance, and Possibility

Sat, Sep 19, 9:00 PM
From Kaavya Connections: World Poetry, Literature & Music
5.0

Every life contains other lives. The city we almost moved to. The work we once imagined doing. The place we never expected to call home. The friendship that began by accident. The door we opened without knowing where it would lead. Some possibilities disappear quietly. Others arrive without invitation and change the course of everything. A chance conversation. A missed train. An unexpected yes. A sudden departure. Someone entering our lives at precisely the right moment. Our lives are shaped not only by the choices we make, but by chance. By timing. By circumstance. By the paths we choose and those that close before us. By encounters we could never have planned. Years later, we sometimes look back and wonder how differently everything might have unfolded. Perhaps every life is accompanied by other possible lives. Selves we once imagined. Paths we chose and paths we left behind. Possibilities we lost—and possibilities we never knew to hope for. **The Lives We Almost Lived** is **a gathering devoted to choice, chance, possibility, and the roads not taken.** Together, we will explore the curious relationship between the life we once imagined, the lives that might have been, and the surprising life that somehow became our own. Across traditions, poets and writers have wondered about these turns of fate and possibility. C.P. Cavafy wrote of journeys and the lives formed along the way. Fernando Pessoa inhabited multiple selves and imagined identities. Elizabeth Bishop found entire histories inside departures and distant places. Wisława Szymborska returned again and again to chance—the astonishing accidents through which one life becomes ours rather than another. Agha Shahid Ali wrote across memory, migration, exile, and return. This gathering asks: **How have unexpected choices and chance encounters shaped the lives we are living?** **What possibilities opened when other paths did not unfold as we imagined?** **What parts of our earlier dreams and imagined selves still travel with us?** **How might the roads not taken help us see the road we are on differently?** We will read poems about choices and coincidences, missed encounters and unexpected arrivals, abandoned dreams and surprising beginnings, alternate selves, migration, love, friendship, and the mysterious turns through which a life acquires its shape. You are welcome to bring: * A poem about a choice, chance encounter, or turning point. * A piece about a road taken—or not taken. * A poem about a place you almost called home or someone who might have changed your life. * A piece about an abandoned dream, an earlier self, or a future once imagined. * An original work about the person you might have become. We invite poetry from all languages and traditions. Together, we will read, translate, reflect, and listen—allowing different possibilities and different lives to meet in the same room. As always with Kaavya Connections, the gathering may wander beyond the theme. We follow where the poems, memories, and conversations lead. Join us for an afternoon not about regret, but about possibility—the choices and accidents that shape us, the paths that disappeared behind us, and the mysterious life that somehow became our own. Bring a friend, a poem, an unlived possibility—or simply come to listen. **Above all, bring the roads you have traveled and the ones you still sometimes wonder about.** Please find more about us here — Kaavya Connections Website: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Please also join the mailing list for upcoming gatherings and events: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) If you would like to volunteer to help organize future gatherings and performances, please email: [contact@kaavyaconnections.com](mailto:contact@kaavyaconnections.com) **Kaavya Connections**

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8 attendees
Sit Down and Write

Sit Down and Write

Sun, Sep 13, 6:00 PM
From Oakland Creative Writers
4.8

Writers write. And if you haven't written in a room full of writers writing, you haven't lived! It's a nice feeling, at the least. 11:00 a.m. Arrive, find a spot, support our patron by purchasing a beverage and/or snack and tipping well. Then socialize until writing-time begins! A few minutes before, we'll go around the circle introducing ourselves, our writing passions, and our goal for the day. 11:15 a.m. The organizer will start the clock, and for the next 1 hour conversation shall be discontinued as everyone works on whatever writing or reading (or what-have-you) strikes his or her fancy. The key here is a nice, courteous quiet. Headphones are recommended. 12:15 p.m. Writing-time ends. You're welcome to continue writing, resume socializing, hail a cab, do whatever you want, because you're an adult.

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4 attendees
Sit Down and Write

Sit Down and Write

Sun, Sep 20, 6:00 PM
From Oakland Creative Writers
4.8

Writers write. And if you haven't written in a room full of writers writing, you haven't lived! It's a nice feeling, at the least. 11:00 a.m. Arrive, find a spot, support our patron by purchasing a beverage and/or snack and tipping well. Then socialize until writing-time begins! A few minutes before, we'll go around the circle introducing ourselves, our writing passions, and our goal for the day. 11:15 a.m. The organizer will start the clock, and for the next 1 hour conversation shall be discontinued as everyone works on whatever writing or reading (or what-have-you) strikes his or her fancy. The key here is a nice, courteous quiet. Headphones are recommended. 12:15 p.m. Writing-time ends. You're welcome to continue writing, resume socializing, hail a cab, do whatever you want, because you're an adult.

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2 attendees
The Geography Within Us: A Poetry Gathering on Place, Memory, and Belonging

The Geography Within Us: A Poetry Gathering on Place, Memory, and Belonging

Sat, Oct 17, 9:00 PM
From Kaavya Connections: World Poetry, Literature & Music
5.0

Perhaps home is not simply the place we come from. Perhaps it is a language in which our name sounds different. A kitchen where someone knows what we like to eat. A city whose streets our feet remember. A landscape whose seasons still live somewhere in the body. A person beside whom we do not have to explain ourselves. A song that returns us somewhere. Or a place where we arrived as strangers and, slowly, unexpectedly, learned to belong. We carry many geographies within us. The place where we were born. The neighborhood where we grew up. The cities we chose and the ones circumstance chose for us. The landscapes we left behind. The languages through which we learned to understand the world. The people who made unfamiliar places feel like home. Over time, these places become more than locations on a map. They enter our memories, our gestures, our food, our music, our language, even the ways we understand distance and belonging. Sometimes we leave a place and discover that it never entirely leaves us. And sometimes a place we never imagined belonging to becomes part of who we are. **The Geography Within Us** is **a gathering devoted to place, memory, and belonging, and to the many landscapes, languages, people, and journeys that quietly become part of our inner lives**. Together, we will explore not simply where we come from, but the more mysterious question of **what places have become part of who we are.** Across traditions, poets have carried entire worlds within their poems. Mahmoud Darwish carried Palestine through memory and language. Agha Shahid Ali recreated Kashmir across distance and longing. Derek Walcott explored the ways landscape, history, and identity become inseparable. Naomi Shihab Nye finds belonging in family, language, ordinary encounters, and the crossings between cultures. Joy Harjo writes of land, ancestry, memory, and our deep relationship with place. Their poems remind us that geography is not only something outside us. It can also become something we carry within. This gathering asks: **What places have become part of who we are?** **How do landscapes, languages, cities, and communities continue to live within us long after we leave them?** **And how do the places we discover unexpectedly change our understanding of where we belong?** We will read poems about childhood streets and adopted cities, familiar landscapes and distant homelands, kitchens and train stations, migration and arrival, language and memory, journeys and returns, and the unexpected places where belonging finds us. You are welcome to bring: * A poem about a place that has shaped you. * A piece connected to a city, landscape, language, neighborhood, or community you carry within you. * A poem about leaving somewhere, arriving somewhere, or unexpectedly finding a sense of belonging. * A song, photograph, recipe, memory, or passage that transports you to another place. * An original work about a geography, real or imagined, that has become part of who you are. We invite poetry from all languages and traditions. Together, we will read, translate, reflect, and listen, allowing the different geographies we carry to meet in the same room. As always with Kaavya Connections, the gathering may wander beyond the theme. We follow where the poems, memories, and conversations lead. Join us for an afternoon exploring the places that made us, the places that changed us, the places that surprised us, and the places that continue to live quietly within us. Bring a friend, a poem, a place, or simply come to listen. **Above all, bring the worlds you carry within you.** Please find more about us here — Kaavya Connections Website: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Please also join the mailing list for upcoming gatherings and events: [https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/](https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) If you would like to volunteer to help organize future gatherings and performances, please email: [contact@kaavyaconnections.com](mailto:contact@kaavyaconnections.com) **Kaavya Connections**

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7 attendees
IN PERSON Saturday Morning Writing Meetup

IN PERSON Saturday Morning Writing Meetup

Sat, Oct 10, 5:00 PM
From East Bay Women Writers
4.9

After a six-month haitus, this weekly Saturday morning writing session is back! I'm pleased to say this group has been meeting for four years. This is a place for women looking for time, space and community to work on their writing goals -- poetry, fiction, journaling, non-fiction, essays, whatever words you need to get out. We meet in person, writing at my home in Emeryville (which has different rooms and corners where folks can plug in a laptop or sit with a notebook and work on their poems, journal entries, novels, plays, memoirs, etc. I'll provide coffee and tea :) Schedule: 10:00-10:15 a.m.: Introductions and socializing. 10:15-11:15: One hour of writing. A prompt will be provided, but if you have an idea for your morning writing, work on that :) 11:15 to noon: Regroup and (optional) share. Everyone gets five minutes to read their work out loud to the group. This is voluntary and there is no critique from others. Vaccination required. My address will be sent to those who RSVP.

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5 attendees
Think Outside the Covers with Laurie McLean

Think Outside the Covers with Laurie McLean

Sun, Sep 20, 8:00 PM
From California Writers Club - Berkeley Branch
4.6

Join the California Writer's Club for our monthly speaker series. This meeting also functions as our club meeting and is a great way to get to know our organization, while also experiencing a great speaker talk from a writer, for writers. [Tickets via Eventbrite HERE](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/think-outside-the-covers-with-laurie-mclean-tickets-1999147693567) ABOUT THE TALK Kick off your writing season with our first speaker of the year, literary agent Laurie McLean at a brand new location off Piedmont Avenue. By 2050, every author will be an authorpreneur, predicts Fuse Literary partner/agent Laurie McLean. Because your book is more than just a book. It’s a story. And with all the myriad new technologies and storytelling opportunities at hand, publishing is experiencing a revolution that you should be a part of. Come hear this successful, seasoned agent, and former Director of the San Francisco Writers Conference, update you on the state of publishing, leaving ample time for questions! ABOUT LAURIE McLEAN Founding Partner FUSE LITERARY Laurie McLean spent 20 years as the CEO of a multi-million-dollar marketing agency and 8 years as an agent/senior agent at Larsen Pomada Literary Agents before co-founding Fuse Literary in 2013 with her business partner Gordon Warnock. Laurie specializes in middle-grade, young-adult and adult genre fiction including romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, and weird westerns. Laurie was on the management team of the San Francisco Writers Conference for more than 20 years, including as the Director for five years, and co-founded two ePublishing companies that she eventually sold: Joyride Books for romance, and Ambush Books for tween and teen books. Find out more at [FuseLiterary.com](FuseLiterary.com) or follow her on most social media @fuseliterary. Get to Know our Club President, Debi Mason, in our Member Spotlight. **Location** This event will be LIVE at the new GOODNESS Community Center off of Piedmont Avenue, right behind Peets Coffee. Space is limited, grab your tickets asap! **Agenda (more details in Eventbrite where you must purchase tickets)** 12:30-1 Setup, Members can come early to help and socialize 1:00-2:00 Author Success Group 2:00-2:15 Networking 2:15-2:45 Club Announcements/Monthly Members Meeting 02:45 PM-03:00 PM - Member Spotlight, Debi Mason 03:00 PM-03:45 PM - Keynote Speaker, Laurie McLean ABOUT THE CALIFORNIA WRITER'S CLUB For more than a hundred years, the Berkeley California Writers Club has educated writers of all abilities in the craft and business of writing. Our purpose is to promote fellowship and to provide practical information that supports writers in achieving their publishing goals. The Berkeley Branch is the founding branch of the statewide [Club](http://calwriters.org/), which now has [23 branches](https://calwriters.org/cwcbranches/) and around 2000 members throughout California.

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3 attendees
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Frequently asked questions

Meetup connects people with similar interests, letting them join groups and participate in events based on their hobbies, careers, or lifestyles.

You can search for writing groups in San Francisco. Browse local events and see which ones match your interests.

Yes, San Francisco has several creative writing groups. You can find groups dedicated to different writing styles or genres.

Sign up on Meetup, explore writing-related groups in San Francisco, and join any that interest you.

Absolutely! Many creative writing groups in San Francisco offer workshops to improve your skills and technique.

Some writing groups may offer online events, depending on the organizer's preference and the current situation.

RSVP to the event you're interested in. You may connect with your event organizer for further details if needed.

No, you can choose which events to attend based on your schedule and interests. There's no obligation to attend every event.

Yes, you can join multiple groups on Meetup if they align with your interests and you want to explore different activities.

Most groups welcome writers of all levels, but availability might differ based on the group's goals and size.

Finding a match depends on existing groups. You can start a new group or search for broader writing communities.

While most events are well-coordinated by hosts, organization varies. Reading event reviews can provide insight.

Meetup focuses on group activities, not directly on publishing assistance. You'll find community support, though.

Meetup facilitates connections through shared interests, but the effectiveness depends on your active participation and engagement.

Meetup doesn't guarantee immediate connections. Building relationships typically requires active involvement in groups and events.