On building a writing community

The Breadloaf Open Letter has me thinking a lot about our relationships to each other.

Dear friends,

It has been a long time since I wrote to you. There have been many things going on in my life…

Happily, my partner, Z, and I had our wedding! After months of planning, we ended up with a beautiful, special day, full of love. In the end, it was all worth it to get to share sacred moments with friends and family.

Everyone I show this photo to goes, “Woah, leg!” I hope you too will enjoy my leg. (📸 credit to AGP Collective)

We then got COVID in September amid one of my UC flares. After that, I was diagnosed with POTS, an illness of the nervous system. I am slowly working myself out of my most recent POTS flare, which also seems to be related to COVID.

Thanks for your patience in hearing from me. I hope you’ll send me an update on how you’ve been too. Meanwhile, I also wanted to share that grappling with this illness has led me to reconsider what I want to discuss in this newsletter as well. When I started this Substack, I wanted to write extensively on the process of writing, but lately, I’ve found myself wanting to mirror this newsletter with my artistic concerns. My writing typically interrogates being a body—especially a disabled body—in this world, and I’d like this newsletter to do the same, but with more of an emphasis on my life as a disabled writer, my relationship to the larger (often, but not always, abled) writing community, my philosophy on writing as an extension of my own body, and the process of writing while sick.

In some ways, I don’t think this newsletter will change too much. I’ve talked about some of this before, just not with such an explicit focus on bodies. I hope you’ll stay on with me for this! For all that writing about disability can be painful, I’m confident that this newsletter will also be a lot about reveling in the joyful, creative world that my body—and your body—are a part of too.

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Today, I wanted to share about the excellent open letter that was posted to The Offing this past week. In this letter, the authors—Dure Ahmed, Diana Cejas, Soleil David, emet ezell, Vivian Hu, Itiola Jones, Laura Mauldin, Leila C. Nadir, Seoyoung Park, Annie Tan, and Jodie Vinson—write bravely about an institution many writers know and love: Breadloaf.

I recommend reading the letter in its totality, but I’ll summarize as well: By the end of the Breadloaf Conference in August 2023, over 10% of attendees had contracted COVID. The letter writers share that Breadloaf did not have contingency plans in place for such an outbreak, nor did they encourage masking and/or testing from the outset, which could have prevented such spread from happening in the first place.

Thus, the letter poignantly points out, Breadloaf forced attendees to make their own judgment calls in this situation. And of course, because disabled people are the ones who, at this stage of the pandemic, are often the most careful around COVID, they were othered and made to feel unsafe at the conference:

This disregard for the health of the writing community is profoundly ableist—characterized by assumptions about who makes up the writing community, that disability is atypical, and that disabled people should simply alter their own behaviors (such as mask-wearing or declining to participate in events). Rather than placing the burden of care on the ill and disabled, we are asking that Bread Loaf support a community of care from the start, so the conference is accessible to all. If disabled people are prioritized and cared for, then we are all cared for.

I did not apply for or attend Breadloaf this year, and I have to admit that I am grateful this was the case. While, like many writers, it is one of my dream conferences, it is hard to imagine putting my health at risk for it, even in the future. Having had COVID just a few months ago, I can safely say that getting sick with it is harmful to my body and to my writing. I was lucky enough not to need too much medical intervention, other than Paxlovid, and still, I have had a lot of post-viral difficulty. Since September, I have turned around on long walks because of my shortness of breath, suffered from brain fog and fatigue, managed heart palpitations, undergone more depressive moments than usual, and almost fainted during a reading. Suffice to say, it has been hard to write with all these stressors on my body. I am healing, slowly, but I hope that I can keep protecting myself so I don’t catch COVID again. I don’t want to risk another flare, both for myself and for my art. I am not sure what I would gain at Breadloaf would outweigh the pain and frustration of struggling to write.

Some friends just get you…

I am not a stranger to trying to figure out how to participate in the literary community while protecting myself. In 2022, I attended a writer’s conference elsewhere and chose to leave early because I didn’t feel safe. My colleagues and friends were understanding—and often tried to take it upon themselves to be accommodating—but the setup of the conference was hard. Despite it being a warm, sweet summer, meals were taken inside with conference attendees and other college students. Some groups required masks inside classrooms, but others did not, so I requested to Zoom into the workshop instead. My apartmentmates invited people over without asking me, so I was never sure who would be in my space while I was sleeping. Eventually, a few people did test positive for COVID, and yet none of the protocols changed. That was when I decided to leave for good and finish up the residency at my parents-in-law’s house through Zoom.

I understand, of course, that this conference was meant to be in-person as a way to build community. But lately, I have been wondering what “community” means to the writing world as a whole.

I received a scholarship to the writing conference I went to, but I still paid the organization itself almost $1500 to attend. That year I also turned down other conference/workshop opportunities where I was not awarded a scholarship and would be spending even more to go, especially with a plane ticket included. My experience at the writing conference I did attend was good in some ways, and not-so-good in others. I did work with a famous, talented writer. I did meet some wonderful classmates who have become part of my writer ecosystem. And yet, I still felt ostracized by the organization due to my COVID protocols. I was the one who suggested the Zooming (they did not have any kind of contingency plan in place) and to be honest, that diminished my experience quite a bit. There were no protocols other than having me remove myself from the situation. Was that being part of a community, then? In the end, I left unsure of whether I had found the experience fulfilling or not, and they had $1500 of my money in their pockets.

I fully understand that money is part of running a literary organization. Having worked at one myself, I know that funds are needed to pay teachers, deal with upkeep, and make resources. Unfortunately, grants often don’t pay for everything—or they don’t pay for less sexy things like staff and supplies. And if they do, they’re competitive and there is no guarantee that even the most talented grant writer can get the money.

The problem is, that when someone pays for something, they begin to expect a certain outcome. And though this part of capitalism, it is also understandable. People are barely making it month-to-month, so if they are going to pay a literary organization, they expect to get something out of it—not only an education or something prestigious to add to their CV, but also community. (Let me also pause and say that if community can only be bought through a literary organization, we have to question who gets access to community too. This is a problem in itself too, if you subscribe to these models of community-building.)

I dealt with this all the time when working at a lit org. When surveying our “community members” what we often heard was missing was “community” itself. But when asked how we could increase a sense of community, most of the answers were things we were already doing (classes, readings, opportunities to meet up, weekly free events). I recall this also being an issue in my MFA—my classmates wanted more than our professors could give to their jobs and more often than not, student community groups broke down because of the immense pressure put on each other.

A community mural in Philadelphia, depicting human compassion through plants and flowers. You can find out more here: https://www.muralarts.org/artworks/curing-community/ (📸 by Steve Weinik)

My writing community ebbs and flows with time. Right now, some of my closest friends are in an online Discord group. In the past, I’ve had very close relationships with other MFAers from my program, and I’ve maintained those relationships as best I can with distance. Once I moved to Philadelphia, I met other writers and joined a group that meets every few months to share and support each other. I’m lucky because I do have relationships with other writers— but I also think that I have far less community than others probably expect I do. I don’t have a dedicated group of readers that I constantly share my writing with, nor do I workshop all the time. I don’t meet with other writers for writing dates very frequently. I talk about writing with my community (but more frequently in terms of the industry rather than sending out writing prompts), but I also talk about the shit that goes on at work, life drama, and how cute my cat is. To be very simple about it all, my writing community is just having friends who happen to also write. Sometimes we connect about writing, sometimes we connect about other things. And this feels very different to me than the type of extremely writing-focused community that a lot of people envision as being vital to their craft.

The thing about friendship—and this brings me back to the Breadloaf open letter—is that it works best when you love and care about the other person. In the letter, the writers talk about how to cultivate a sense of “care” with each other. But I have often seen other writers think about cultivating a sense of “work.” So often I meet another writer who suggests we meet up so we can “give each other feedback on our stories.” It isn’t as if I don’t want that! But I want it after we have created a sense of trust between us. I want this other person to see me and my body as a full person, not just a writer in motion.

I suspect that when we link community with money (as we have done with institutions), we start seeing community as a tit-for-tat, what can I do for you/what can you do for me type of deal. But community is about knowing each other deeply, about laughing together, about allowing someone to fuck up and then learn, about discourse, about play, about venting, about taking space when you need it, about remembering each others’ humanity. I am not sure that every person who attends a writing conference is even looking for community (maybe you go to Breadloaf for just the agent meetings!), but if you are, I think it’s worth thinking about what kind of relationships you want to cultivate in these spaces. Lead with care, as the Breadloaf letter writers suggest, and love will follow.

As a reminder, you can add your name to the Breadloaf open letter here.

xx,

Eshani

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Thanks for reading Surya Means Sun! If you want to connect with me outside of this newsletter, you can always follow me on social media @__eshani.

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