My GPS informs me that I have arrived. I take a deep breath in and zip my jacket before stepping into the cold November air. I’m unsure if I’m up for either of my upcoming tasks: facing the darkness spiced by cold rain and wind, or walking into a room full of strangers. But I could use some friends and maybe a purpose.
I surprise myself with being early. I double-check that it is, indeed, Wednesday. Four tables form a square in a windowless classroom. A girl who resembles one of the thumbtacks on the Meet Up page walks in and I sigh with relief that I am in the right place. Her laptop sports a sticker that has something to do with Korea. Cultural diversity is good. I don’t know anything about Korea.
Close to a dozen people shuffle in and set up laptops, others sit at the ready with pens and notebooks. I consider the empty space on the table in front of me as an excuse to leave – it would make sense to bring at least a pen to a writers’ group – but the meeting starts and it’s too late.
To my horror, the man in a flat cap and ripped blue jeans not only announces my presence but invites everyone in the room to introduce themselves and talk about writing genres of choice. People share that they write short stories and novels and poetry and scifi fantasy and oh my goodness, I do not belong here, I don’t even know what I write!
I mumble something about newspaper reporting I’ve been doing for the last ten years. I add that I would like to try my hand at fiction. I wonder if changing names in a real story counts as fiction.
“It was a dark and stormy night” is the prompt for a free-write, a writing exercise. The idea is to start writing and see what happens. Terrifying. Borrowed pen and piece of paper create the runway for my flight of thought. It takes off but crashes immediately, recreating the scene from Final Destination framed by the large airport window. Dark and stormy indeed. Writing is hard. Some writers, surely trained for bravery by the military, read what they wrote out loud. I study the door…
I return the following week, and the week after. I fall in love with the craft of writing as much as the company. Here, I don’t have to fit in. I just fit. And write.
I put pen to paper, no longer borrowed. For the first few months, I only read and listen. But then ideas of my own arrive. They get pilot licenses and take off, leaving the Final Destination in the 90s. Some of them, like this repeated mention of a dated flick, are of questionable quality. I play with them anyway. Sometimes on second or third reads, I start to like them and keep them. I practice the craft.
I do a little more than change the names of real people and write my very first short fiction story. The readers cheer for the free-spirited heroine as the man she seemingly loves drinks his despair away. I hate to admit, I like the cheeky flake, too. This story, “Drift in the Night,” gets published in a short story anthology, “Not Quite as You Were Told.” It takes me years before I can bring myself to read the printed version in the book, maybe because I can’t believe it’s real.
In the group, we talk about what writers talk about – favorite books, grammar, passive voice, and character arcs, POVs, and unreliable narrators (isn’t that everybody?). Once a month someone mentions Chekhov’s gun. We save a lot of cats. Or at least decide we should, to make our characters more likable. We travel into each other’s worlds. We laugh and we cry. We art.
As the pandemic puts us behind screens, we tune ours to each other and watch faces in boxes, seeking the connections we’ve lost while hiding from the virus. We call it virtual happy hour. The virtual part is accurate, but we’re not very happy and we stay by the screens well after-hours. We drink alone. And still, we write. When restrictions lift, we gather again, sharing stories of our survival, through the pandemic and through life, in the pages we share.
My eyes open. I notice rain droplets on elephant ears plants after a rain. I describe birds in my journal. I search for just the right words for things. Sometimes I wonder if falling down a manhole while crossing the street would be such a terrible thing – I could learn what that feels like and use that in a story. If I survive the fall.
I write more and more. Short fiction, personal essays, even poems. My work gets published – stories about survival, moments of rest, and immigration experiences. The second thought that comes after I hear my cancer diagnosis is, “Think of all the material!” The first, quite brief, was of dying. My mind plays with verbs and nouns in treatment rooms. Oblivious to my own fear, I only learn of its existence from my writing. That’s how I talk to myself now, through writing.
When I don’t feel too sick, I return to my writer’s group, a pink wig atop my head. Four tables form a rectangle. Laptops with and without stickers surround me. Wednesday nights are for healing.
I still get nervous shivers when it’s my turn to speak out loud. I do it scared. I write scared, too. It’s worth it because it’s my purpose. And it’s worth it because I found my tribe.
Mark Twain famously said, “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” I think my second day was that day, that night, dark and stormy, when I first put pen to paper to see what would happen. When that GPS mentioned that I’d arrived at my destination, it was spot on.
P.S. There was no cat to save, only myself.