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!
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.
