***
There was a full house at Interabang
Books this week as Dallas’s newest independent bookstore and
the Writer’s League of Texas hosted a panel discussion
about community building for writers. And we hadn’t even known there would be
cupcakes! (Those arrived courtesy of irrepressible panel member, author and
community organizer, Arianne “Tex” Thompson,
decorated with the names and logos of local writers’ communities.)
No, we were there because,
despite the Hemingwayesque stereotype of writers as antisocial loners –
possibly hard drinking ones at that – the local authors on the panel –Thompson,
Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Blake Kimzey – extolled the necessity of
connections.
“It is so important for every industry
to own its issues,” Thompson said. “For football, it’s brain injury. For ballet
dancers, it’s eating disorders. For us it’s –”
“Hemorrhoids,” an audience member
shouted.
Well, at least anxiety, Thompson
acknowledged, when the laughter had died down. “You writers, there’s something
seriously wrong with you!” (More laughter, some slightly self-conscious.) “It’s
important that we need a counterbalance to the word hamsters running around in
our heads. You need a writing community if you’re going to stay healthy and
stay in the game.”
 |
| l-r, Lenhardt, Kent, Kimzey |
And that, if in more chaste language,
was the tone of the discussion moderated by the League’s member services
manager, Jordan Smith.
“Why is it important for writers to be
in a community?” Smith asked. “And how do you find a community?”
Kimzey agreed. Now a prolific short
story author and founder/director of Writing Workshops Dallas, he confessed to
starting his writing career as an alternative to his day job.
“I was nodding off in a cubicle 10 years
ago,” the author of “a lot of vignettes,” but no completed stories until he
found a creative writing workshop at Brookhaven Community College.
“It was transforming for me. There I
was, getting feedback for the first time.”
He and the other students – mostly
college freshmen and sophomores years younger than he was – took a second
course together because they formed such strong bonds. (Kimzie would even take
the course a third time, and end with nine completed stories.) “Now I have my
gang of four, all at different stages. It’s important to have a cohort.”
“I started by going to the DFW Writers
Workshop,” Lenhardt said, where she was able to grow her Stillwater
mystery series and award-winning historical novels. “They ‘got’ me in a way my
family didn’t.”
The stay-at-home mom went to her first
workshop meeting and thought, “Oh, my God, nobody asked about my kids.” It
wasn’t that workshop members didn’t care about her kids, she said, but that her
relationship with them was being built as a comrade, not on the family
connections which had previously dominated her life.
Kent, on the other hand, already
completed the manuscript that would become her New York Times
bestseller, The Heretic’s Daughter, on her own. She has said in other
contexts that she kept her writing a secret from almost everyone except her
mother, fearing the eyeball rolls if she confessed to it, with another career
and well into middle age. “I wish I’d had a group like that.”
Which doesn’t mean it’s ever too late to
start, either with writing or finding a community.
“Unlike, for instance, downhill skiing,
writing is something you can begin at 50,” she quipped.
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