On Doing and Writing

Hey readers! I have not posted in a while because I have been out doing things and writing about them, and then doing more things and writing about them too. I finally edited a story based on one of the things I did in the past week: attend a writing group.

Enjoy! And, as always, I would love to hear what folks think.

XOXO

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On Wednesday, Emily, new to the city, decided to attend a writing group at her local coffee shop. This would be her chance to finally meet the cool-looking people with curious gazes she made prolonged eye contact with while crossing the street. People she assumed were all writers.

Emily got to the coffee shop 3 hours before the start time because, unlike the other people in the group who probably had day jobs and life responsibilities, Emily was a writer. A term she had only started calling herself three weeks earlier, when she decided to turn down the nonprofit job she told everyone at graduation she was going to take, and instead, write a novel about herself and pay her rent serving mussels to the city’s rich gay men.

Almost immediately after making her decision, Emily’s spelling and grammar worsened significantly. When she got to the coffee shop, she whipped her legal pad out of her backpack and scribbled “Freeright” at the top. A week ago she had started writing on this legal pad because when she used her laptop, she somehow ended up on Indeed.com, anxiously scrolling through job listings. Next to “Freeright”, she wrote the date, “June 26th, 2022” and then, not having a clear plan as to what to write next, she began scribbling at full speed about last night’s dream in which the only female line cook at the restaurant miraculously grew a huge penis and fucked her with it. Someone would want to know about this.

She looked at her wristwatch, it was getting close to 4pm, the start time of the meetup. The first 90 minutes, according to the website, would be for solo writing (Check!). Then, at 5:30 the group would meet in the back room to share what they were working on.

She looked around the coffee shop. The website showed 4 other people had RSVPed. Who of all these strangers on their laptops were Rebecca, Joshua, Mike and Nick? Probably not the extremely tall lady sitting next to her making a Power Point about the five steps of water treatment. Probably not the heavy breather who had asked Emily for the shop’s wifi password and was now watching a documentary about Ancient Egypt, a posh British accent blasting from his computer speakers.

Emily couldn’t tell what the fellow writers actually looked like from their pictures on the ‘Meetup’ site, most of them depicted fictional selves: Joshua’s profile picture was of a man on fire, Mike's was of a vehicle of war, Nick’s was of an illegible meme with multiple frames from a Pixar movie. Rebecca was the only one with a real picture of herself, but in it,f her face completely eclipsed by the small fluffy dog she was holding, so lovingly.

Emily looked around some more. She thought the large man with a thin mustache in the corner of the room looked like someone who would make his friends on the internet. He kept looking around with a needy expression, intermittently restacking the pile of books in front of him, as if he wasn’t accustomed to being in public and didn’t quite know what to do with his hands. At 5:22, he restacked his books one last time and placed them one by one into his briefcase. He got up and went to the backroom, where the internet said the group met. There were two identical couches perpendicular to one another with an armchair in between them, and, across from one of the couches was a long wooden bench, suite low to the ground. The large thin mustached man sat generously in the armchair, all of a sudden very comfortable, as if at home in the coffee shop . The cushion under him squeezing under his body, and looked around him with an expectant look on his face, as if everyone in the coffee shop owed him something; Emily was certain this man was Joshua, the group organizer, the man in flames.

At 5:28, the young guy sitting to Emily’s right wearing a matching Under Armor hat and flip flops made his way to the backroom and sat on the couch next to Joshua. They seemed to know each other; they sat back and casually talked to each other, in the slightly disinterested way men sometimes do.

At 5:30, the lanky man with salt and pepper hair sitting at a one person table in the middle of the shop got up, looked around and timidly joined the pair. He was probably new to the group like Emily.

This is it, Emily thought at 5:32, putting away her legal pad. She walked across the shop to the backroom and sat on the edge of the couch next to Under Armor guy, who seemed more charming now; his legs were crossed and his slide was dangling delicately off his big toe. The lanky man with salt and pepper hair was in the middle of telling the group he was a preschool teacher writing fairy tales for his class of 4-year-olds. Emily thought of the line cook’s cock, which she had been describing in detail a second earlier.

At 5:35 the dog-faced woman popped around the corner apologizing, she had been in the flow and completely lost track of time. Emily felt a touch of relief, a woman. “Did I hear fairy tales?”, dog-face exclaimed, arching her back and sinking her butt besides the preschool teacher, “that’s what I write!...Oh wait, sorry, were you done talking?” The preschool teacher was all done.

It occurred to Emily that Dogface seemed like more of a cat person. She was writing a princess and the pauper short story set in 18th century Spain, but 50 years from the present. Everyone seemed to know what this meant. The princess and the pauper were teenage girls, and it was a coming of age story. Today she wrote the first encounter between the two girls and was excited by the ways in which the characters were revealing themselves to each other and to her, right in front of her eyes. She had a slightly crazed look.

“Make sure you don’t get too caught up describing the characters, you might lose a sense of where the story is going,” interjected the suspected group organizer from his orange chair corner. Dogface nodded with worried eyes, he was right of course, she surely did not want to lose a sense of where the story was going.

Although it wasn’t clear whether dogface was done with her check-in, the orange chair began talking. Sure enough his name was Joshua and he was the group organizer, as Emily had known in her heart of hearts. He’d been writing a sci-fi book for longer than he was proud to admit, he said proudly. He had recently resumed writing after a two year hiatus. He left the book at its climax (Literary edging?), at the central battle scene between enemy clans. Today he had struggled to get down a fight scene between the hero and his evil twin brother. It was like pulling teeth. Under Armor could relate; they smiled at each other sweetly. Emily looked at the organizer’s teeth: they were small and rounded at the corners, evenly spaced, he was talking very loudly.

Then it was Under Armor’s turn. He was working on a dystopian YA novel set in Renaissance France. He spoke quickly and said some more things Emily didn’t understand.

Emily stared at the white slide that was now hanging from the cusp of his toe. Someone cleared their throat.

Emily looked up, the group had turned to her. She felt a low heat rise from her chest to her cheeks. She looked down, gathering her thoughts. Her yellow t-shirt was spotted with brown-red food stains. Her nipples were hard, forming small, loose tents between her shoulders.

Why did she suddenly feel so embarrassed to introduce herself? Even with her tents pitched through her disgusting shirt, she felt better than these people. Her story was better than theirs’: they wrote fantastical stories about princesses and knights that were set, simultaneously, in the past and the future.

Emily pressed the souls of her feet into the ground like her therapist told her to, feeling the ground press back. She felt very alone.

“Hi, my name is Emily. I’m writing a sort of memoir. I guess the genre would be autofiction.”

“Like cars?” Under Armor was quick. The group chuckled.

“Like self,” Emily almost gagged.

“The book is written in a deeply subjective third person narrative and is about a 22 year old named Emily who is trying to decide whether to write a novel or become a social worker…The character is pretty much me,” she gestured to her small campground, “and the events are just the things that happen to me day to day, but I exaggerate my negative traits and describe the world as if lived in slow motion.” Emily could feel the way this sounded, as if tasting the words in her mouth–slow motion.

“So, like, what’s the plot?” dogface really wanted to know, her crazed look was now directed at me.

“Well, I don’t quite know yet, there’s not really a plot at all or a consistent narrative even. I want the narrative to sound like a kind of consciousness. I’m leaning into the narcissism that female writers often get accused of for writing about themselves by just writing a novel that doesn’t try to hide the fact that it is all about me. I’m going for something confessional and real. Making myself naked to the world. Like contemporary fiction I guess but without the first person.”

Dogface was thinking hard.

“Well I think that women…and men, correct me if I’m wrong and you feel like this too…but women, we are always monitoring ourselves as if in the third person. As if the you who is in the room is separate from the you who is in your head, and you are constantly adjusting your behavior to fit some social norm of how you are supposed to act. So what you seem to be writing is what female consciousness feels like.”

The organizer snorted. He hated women. He hated this conversation. He said it was time to go, the coffee shop was closing soon.

As she paced far ahead of the group, Emily wondered why she felt her writing was more valuable than everyone else's’. Her detailed descriptions of gender-bending sex dreams and of the innocent people who happened to walk past her window weren’t any more valuable to society than a dystopian novel about Renaissance France. The writers in the group wrote to escape reality and Emily wrote to inhabit her reality more completely, yet, were either of them doing anything to make reality better for anyone else?

Emily imagined a world in which everyone wanted to become a writer. The world would surely fall apart. As she walked out of the coffee shop, a few paces ahead of the group, she felt grateful for all the people in the world who weren’t writers and were not about to quit their job at any moment to become writers. She thanked the doctors, firefighters and engineers for their steadfastness.

Yet, it was hard for Emily to imagine how people went their whole lives without the urge to make art. She felt deep down that everyone wanted to become an artist. Was it not a primal instinct? Like the urge to look at your reflection in a passing storefront.

But then again maybe not everyone saw it this way. Maybe not everyone wanted to see themselves. Or maybe they already did see themselves. Maybe it was just Emily who didn’t quite know who she was.