Although there isn’t a writing conference where alcohol is specifically prohibited (yet), the writer Vonetta Young said that the VONA conference (for writers of color) doesn’t provide any conference-sponsored alcohol, and writers Caitlin Horrocks and Tara Lindis-Corbell both said the same thing of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Librarian and inn manager Jesica Sweedler DeHart says that food takes center stage at the Orcas Island Literary Festival where most of the events are hosted by a tea or coffee company.
If you need extra support around alcohol, look for programs that have recovery meetings that are relatively easy to get to and attend. “Going somewhere with a strong recovery presence,” suggests the writer Hallie Goodman, “can help you connect with other writers who are feeling a little alienlike as they see all of their peers get sloshed.”
Take an online writing class
Since the advent of digital technology, there might not be a better boon for writers than the online writing class. Though the classes are online, the students and the teachers are real people, busy ones like you. And with the rising popularity of online writing classes, the standards set for teachers are very (very!) high: as I write, the likes of Arif Anwar, Yahdon Israel, and Leigh Stein are all teaching online, and the talent in the student pool is equally impressive.
Even if you’re not meeting in person, online classes offer emerging writers important social benefits: you might make a friend you can go on to workshop with privately; if you have a positive relationship with your teacher, you can ask them for a recommendation letter at some point in the future. Learning to take—and give—feedback from your peers will also help you gain the technical skills you’ll need to be more self-reliant when you are revising your own work.
In addition to expanding your personal writing network, online classes can bolster your creativity and imagination, too. Would you try a screenwriting class in an MFA program if you were accepted there for poetry? Maybe not. But with their affordability, convenience, and lower-stakes environment for experimentation, you can try out translation, travel writing, memoir, erotica, and many other genres you might not have had the time—or even the permission—to try in an MFA.
Join (or start) a writing group
If you haven’t had any success finding an existing writing group through the common channels (your local library, bookstore, or good old word of mouth), it might be time to start one of your own. You can post flyers in actual brick-and-mortar places, or use social-gathering sites like Meetup to gauge interest in your group. Remember that your group doesn’t have to be stylistically homogenous; it will serve you as a writer if your comembers have varied life experiences and are working in different genres than you.
Attend AWP
It’s not cheap to get to and it usually takes place in the godforsaken month of February, but AWP (which stands for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs [which should actually be abbreviated as AWWP, but . . . artistic license?]) is an annual conference attended by thousands and thousands of publishing professionals and writers. A conference as large as this one can feel panic-attack-level overwhelming at times, but there’s no better one-stop shopping for all your career needs. At the many parties and off-site readings offered throughout the five-day conference, you can hear new work and socialize with like-minded artists; at the book fair, you can spend hours talking with conference and writing-program managers about the different opportunities they offer; you can network for job opportunities in academia and publishing; you can browse everything from quirky chapbooks to doorstopper bestsellers, and enjoy conversations with the editors, publicists, and interns who brought those books to life. If you’re feeling up for it, you can even pitch projects to an editor, and you can flick something grody at the editor from [name of literary magazine redacted] who has rejected every piece you’ve ever sent.
A word to the wise: AWP lists discount codes on its website for hotel and airline fare. Make sure to use these discounts when you book!
Join a book club if you’re not already in one
Learning to read other people’s work, to question it, and to praise it in a clear and concise manner are skills essential to any writer, as is the proper handling of oneself around copious amounts of white wine.
Read
Duh, right? Not so fast. If you want to be an active member of the literary community, you have to read beyond the kind of work you normally gravitate toward, in both genre and style. Every fall there are lists about the top ten or twenty books out that year: earmark BuzzFeed’s most-anticipated novels, read the National Book Award poetry finalists, set yourself a goal. Subscribe to literary magazines (and read them), and visit the areas of your local library that you usually avoid. Challenge yourself to leave well-thought-out reviews of these books on social-cataloging sites like Goodreads, so that you learn to speak respectfully about other people’s work. In an MFA program, you would be thoughtfully critiquing other people’s writing on the regular, so don’t slack on this skill set.
A quick tip about book reviews, especially online: Do not leave negative reviews of authors whom you might one day want to beseech or befriend. Early in your career, you might not know who these people are yet, so book-review with caution. As a general rule of thumb, if you have negative thoughts about somebody’s creative output, it’s best to let them die a silent death inside your mind.
Volunteer at a literary festival
If you can’t be invited by them, join ’em. Literary festivals are always in need of volunteers, and they’re one of the best ways to stay connected to the writing world. If you offer up your services, make sure to choose a committee that actually suits your career interests: event planning will give you an idea of how panels are organized (with a sneak peak at the kind of topics you can one day hope to talk about yourself), public relations will give you experience writing press releases and interfacing with the media, and hospitality can put you in the same orbit as the authors you admire.
If your volunteer time is limited, festivals, arts organizations, and literary magazines always need extra help during their end-of-the-year fund-raisers.
If you do all these things, or even half of them, while also keeping up a regular writing practice, you’re going to find your book people, and they’re going to find you. If you still find yourself yearning for a more codified community after all these efforts, start researching part-time and/or low-residency MFA programs. More affordable, less competitive, and more flexible with scheduling than their full-time counterparts, part-time MFA programs will only need you on campus two to three times a week (usually at times that are convenient for nine-to-fivers), and low-res programs offer long-distance education with site-specific meetups one or two times a year.
I cannot tell you how many times I have written a book-length manuscript only to realize that it would perform better as a personal essay or op-ed, and that the novel I actually needed to write was hiding within a sentence on page seventy-three. I’m not exaggerating: I write a book to find a book all the freaking time, and this process is infuriating, and not a little heartbreaking, but it does—eventually—guide me to the thing I’m meant to write.
In case you share my predilection to need to write (and write) your way to the true story, I’ve come up with a checklist to help you figure out if you are running the wrong race.
Is this book actually a personal essay, and I just don’t know it yet?
During the writing of my second novel, I suffered a second-term miscarriage that I wanted to make the topic of book three. There was a lot of mismanagement of my medical information in the wake of the pregnancy loss, and I suffered some bizarre physical repercussions