Alone and Together

I’ve lost my writing group.  It’s on a hiatus that I fear won’t resume.  The facilitator is on vacation, the two other group members have chosen not to

continue.  We may get new group members, maybe not. 

I used to hold a resolute image of authors as stoically alone producing masterpieces – prodigious and copious works – without the need of anybody or anything.  They already had it all if they were published.  Not so.  They all belonged to writing groups.

Christopher Moore, when he lived in Cambria California, wrote of the workshops he regularly attended in Santa Barbara by Shelly Lowenkopf and what he got

from them, how they shaped his stories and himself as a writer.  Chuck Palahniuk, a writer who truly stands alone in style and philosophy, blew my mind yet again but in a completely unexpected way when I read the introduction to his book of true stories, “Stranger than Fiction”.  This bigger than life icon in my imagination of a lone renegade, spoke eloquently and at length on the concept of the eternal cycle of “alone, together; alone, together.”  He was part of a writer’s group, every Thursday night.  He attributes to this group the reason he writes.  He attended workshops, understands and espouses the necessity of “together”.  This was a profound reinforcing revelation for me. 

And so now, of course, I am obsessed yet again with the necessity of finding my own support group, my Algonquin Round Table that’s finally set for more

than one.  I haven’t found it yet.  But I’ve glommed onto the absolute necessity of being part of such a group, convinced myself I can’t be a writer without one.

This can become yet one more thing I decide I have to have established before I can write; before I am allowed to write, before I am allowed to be a writer.  I need to work on having these positive aspirations, yet not allowing them to hobble me.  I know the spin I need – I work in my lonely garret alone, a tortured artist driven mad by the words and stories

that engulf me.  I create my product in this fetid, stewing, Petri dish.  I then take my twisted creation – not yet alive, not yet murdered – to a group of like-minded, equally tortured souls, and with our individual offerings and passions, we craft an enduring community and our creations leap from pages to consume us. 

What a fantasy.  I long for that table, that era that doesn’t exist.  I’ve always had the perception that I was born too late, or maybe too soon, because when I look around I don’t see it, I don’t find it.  “It” only exists somewhere else in time, in some other locale made legitimate by the presence of A Gifted One.  I have to move to San Francisco, Washington, Oregon, Paris, Greece, where my heroes made it work, where the community has been established.

Or maybe I forge my own community.  Here.  Now.  I don’t think I’m the only one.  If you don’t find what you want, create it, right?  Or maybe my old group will rise from the ashes and miraculously reanimate, transform; become exactly what I need.  Or I can create what I really need from this group.

Now that’s an aspiration.  The key appears to be the movement, to engage and traverse the cycle.  Write alone; come together.  With my own neuroses though that natural life-affirming cycle bears a twist – when I’m alone with nothing but quality hours stretching before

me, tied up in red velvet ribbons, bestowed upon me on a silver and ruby platter, all I want is to be with others, in community, and I yearn for the reinforcement, the validation.  When I’m with others, it’s interminable.  I loathe them; resent their intrusion into the precious time I could be using alone, writing happily and productively in my garret. 

Is it still “natural” if you have to force it?  If you have to make yourself engage

one end of the pendulum or the other that intellectually you know is necessary? 

I accept the necessity and engage because it is necessary; but I have to strive to avoid destruction by self-flagellation and angst because this engagement is not “natural” for me.  Very few things are in this existence.  This is just my version of normal, adaptation. 

Matthew Revert asserts there are “A Million Versions of Right”.  What then can be normal in a field of one million? 
 
I fervently hold on to the hope I’m not alone in my aloneness.  Join me, go away; but let’s never stop dancing together.