The Long Hard Ride of the Free Range Writers

How does a writers group stay together for 20+ years?

Get Lit! is honored to have our guest blogger Buddy Levy reveal his secrets. Festival authors: Mark Steilan, Sam Green, Brandon Schrand, and Brenda Miller will join Buddy to discuss how to design a writers life...where you get the support and the time you need to be successful. That free panel will be at the Spokane Club, Saturday, April 18 at 1pm.

cc from top: Colling Hughes, Lisa Norris, Jane Varley, Kim Barnes

The Long Hard Ride of the Free Range Writers

Part 1--Origins


By Buddy Levy-- blogging for Get Lit!



The thing is, none of us can remember exactly how it all started. That demon Time and Time’s wicked stepsister, the she-devil Memory, have conspired
against agreement on the precise details. But one thing is certain: the Free Range Writers were born in a bar.



And yet, even that claim isn’t unassailable. Better to say our writing
group, which has lasted over twenty years (again, there remains
disagreement as to our date of nascence) and which we now refer to as The
Free Range Writers, began as a core group of aspiring writers who happened
to be teaching college English and/or simultaneously going to graduate
school at the University of Idaho circa 1988, and
as an extension of our course writing, we formed our own weekly workshops
and took them to Moscow’s Garden Lounge, inside the vitals of the historic
Hotel Moscow.

There, in the dim and smoky tavern light, amidst the clink of ice cubes and
the swirl of Tennessee bourbon (or so I like to remember it now—it was more
likely Pabst Blue Ribbon and house Chablis), against the backdrop of frat
boys’ primal monosyllabic mating calls and the grating peal (think fake
fingernails scratching across a Dry Erase board) of acquiescent Sorority
sisters, five intrepid writers—Kim Barnes, Buddy Levy, Jane Varley, Lisa
Norris, and Collin Hughes—met each Monday to talk about, edit, critique,
question, assail and encourage each other’s writing. It is either
circumstantial, coincidental, or intentional that Monday at the Garden Lounge was Blue
Monday, which included a happy hour offering criminally inexpensive hard alcohol.



And we continue to meet--many children and pets and jobs, many
essays and poems and books and a couple of decades later—though now only
once a year.
 The point is that one of us (it must have been Lisa, The
Planner) suggested that we start meeting outside of classes taught and
classes taken, outside of jobs and lives and husbands and wives, and that was all it took: an impetus, a nudging of the stone down the
slope, a swift kick in the collective creative writing ass.

Once we had the outline of a weekly meeting place, a core of writers with
shared commitment, coupled with the expectation of productivity by assigned
deadlines, we were well on our way. Then it was only of matter of whose “turn” it was next week, and the minor detail of writing something you would
be willing to have close and competitive writing associates scrutinize
(verbally, and in pencil and ink) and deconstruct and nurture and sometimes,
though this was rare, suggest be orphaned or abandoned or aborted.



Meeting like that, in those early days of our group, fostered discipline and
devotion, both to the craft and to each other. And it yielded results, not
only in the tangible sense, in books and articles and poems and reviews
published, but by helping us to become writers, supporting our individual
need to live the writer’s life.



For those few golden years when we all lived together in one small college
town, we continued to meet religiously (and indeed, some of us [KIM!!!] even
wrote about religion) once a week, or sometimes once every few weeks, if a
holiday or spring break got in the way. Most importantly, we established a
routine, a pattern, a habit and even a desire to gather. A collective need
to gather. At the start, we were merely writing cohorts, colleagues, and acquaintances, but through our writing group we became much more. We became friends. We became lovers (of the written word, of the story). We became a family.

And when our group—because of graduation and jobs and the like—started to
scatter across and away from the rolling and quilted Palouse (Kim to
LCSC down in Lewiston, Jane and Lisa to Virginia Tech, and Collin and Buddy to Washington State University) we determined not to let our mission, or our writing group, die.

We simply moved it from the bar to the farm.




Note: Don't miss Buddy's reading from Conquistador, Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs along with William Dietrich (The Dakota Cipher) at Auntie's books on Friday, April 17 at 5pm. It should lead to an interesting discussion on historical fiction vs. nonfiction.