Member-only story
Why It’s So Important to Have a Writing Group
In Summer of 2019 I attended an intensive workshop on creative writing at Humber College in Toronto. This was a giant leap for me, not just as a burgeoning writer, but as a person.
I haven’t always been a writer. I’ve done lots of things, from studying law to sitting in an office with a view during the dot com boom and bust to servicing pipe organs to studying nutrition. Through it all I dabbled in music, trying to fit creativity into the spaces of my life between work, school, family and the development of unconstructive habits to soothe the sense that I was missing something.
Just a few years ago I began having the feeling that I wanted to write something, create a story. I’d done it before, with others. A friend and I wrote and recorded an entire rock opera in high school. I’ve never let go, even after several decades, of the sense of satisfaction that this six week period in my teens brought to the quality of my well-being. The problem is that we did that work at just about the time my seventeen year old self felt the need to ‘get serious’ and begin the process of ‘taking on the world’ or ‘showing I could be somebody’. Thus began the series of career choices that made me increasingly miserable but which also led me, ultimately, to where I am today, which is here, at peace, writing this article.
