One great way to connect with the literary community is through author readings and other literary events.

If you live in a big city or a college town, finding author readings and literary events is not difficult.  Any school with a creative writing program or English department will most likely host at least a few literary events every semester.  For instance, The New School in NYC, where I recently received my MFA, has a great reading series and I am sure most schools with MFA programs have similar opportunities.  These days there are colleges with MFA programs spread across the world (and if you factor in regular English departments, that’s an even greater number of options).  So check out your local college or university for more info.  Local libraries and independent bookstores are also a great resource for finding readings or author talks.

I can’t speak much about literary events outside of NYC since this is the area I know best, but for those New Yorkers out there, let me share a few events/resources that I have found to be useful.

• One best-kept-secret that I’ll share with fellow New York writers are the Gotham Writers’ Workshop free workshops in NYC.  You can find a listing of these free events here.  These aren’t exactly “readings” but more like 1hr lessons on craft, but they’re fun and they’re free!
•  For those who love YA literature, check out the Teen Author Readings and the Teen Author Festival.  It features great writers of teen literature and is also fun and free!
• Every fall, the Brooklyn Book Festival includes tons of great author readings.
• Another great resource are literary magazines.  *Warning, shameless plug here*  Some of you have heard me mention Verbal Pyrotechnics in the past (BTW, we’re open for submissions).  This is a literary e-zine I’m involved with that is dedicated to teen literature, and it hosts readings in NYC.  If there’s a literary magazine based near you, check and see if they host readings as well.  This could be a great way to connect with local authors. 

But what if you don’t have a university or college nearby?  Where do you go to hear writers speak and read their work?

• One resource that I really love is Poets.org where you can find poems and bios of several poets as well as some audio recordings of the poets reading their work.
• Podcasts and webinars are other ways that you can hear writer’s speak (like the SheWrites radio link I shared yesterday).
• And let’s not forget This American Life, which isn’t exactly an author reading, but often features authors and columnists and always tells great stories.

Now you might be wondering how often one “should” go to readings.  At the MFA program I attended, we were required to go to a minimum of 8 readings per semester.  For DIY MFA, it all depends on how much time you have and how much time you can dedicate to the community aspect of the program.  One reading per month would be ideal, but if you can’t swing that, do what you can.  The important thing is that you’re reaching out and meeting authors and literary folk face-to-face.  Listening to authors speak and read their work can be inspiring and motivating.

Today’s Task: Let your fingers do the walking and look up a reading or literary event you would like to attend.  Mark it in your calendar and plan to go.  Now tell me, because I’m dying to know, what event did you choose and why?

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I’ve been stalling for a few days, trying to figure out what to say for this post.  See, I wanted to talk about online communities, how to find one that fits your style and how to make the most of them, but I kept running into an impasse.  The internet is a BIG place and there are so many options that it seemed any selection of online communities I mentioned would be horribly minuscule and wouldn’t come close to representing all that the internet can offer.

The second part of the post (how to make the most of online communities) was also giving me trouble because who am I to tell you all how to make the most of your blogging/tweeting/web-surfing?  I’m basically a newbie at it myself.  I mean, I’ve only had this blog for six months and I joined twitter even more recently.

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This is why, instead of giving advice in this post, I’ve decided to tell you all a little about my own journey, what I’ve found that works for me and resources that have helped me along the way.

I started blogging back in 2007 with two blogs: one for knitting and one for writing.  Both were terrible, or at the very least, seriously unfocused.  I had no idea how blogging “worked” and what the “rules” were (mostly because I spent all my time writing and very little time reading other blogs).  I just wrote about whatever came to mind on that day and since my mind was often empty, I didn’t post very often.  I mean, for crying out loud, I had more pictures of my cats on those blogs than I had of stuff relevant to my actual posts.

So I put those blogs out of their misery.

Then in grad school, I decided to give the blog thing another go with swimagainstthegrain.blogspot.com  It still exists… I left it up, because some of the posts are not terrible.  Early one Sunday morning, I started doodling in my notebook and before I knew it, I had drawn this little guy.

I kept doodling and by the time my hubby woke up, I had pages and pages of iggi scattered across the office floor and I had transferred the image to the computer.  It was at that moment that I realized iggi was my “brand” and I needed to adapt my blog accordingly.  So I rebooted my blog, moving from the old url to this one and iggi and I have been a team ever since.

Along the way, I’ve found a series of really useful resources that have helped me figure out the big scary world of the internets.

• inkygirl’s Writer’s Guide to Twitter taught me everything I know about tweeting, twitter chats and twitter etiquette.  She also has a list of twitter chats relating to writing.
• Adventure in Children’s Publishing does a recap every week of Best Articles for Writers every Friday.  It’s organized according to category so it’s easy to find topics you’re looking for.
• Jody Hedlund’s blog is chock-full of useful posts about writing, blogging and social networking.  Here are just a few of the goodies you’ll find on her blog: Learning How to Use Social Media Effectively and How Important is Blogging for Unpublished Writers?
• Elana Johnson just wrote a great post on Monday about building a blog audience: Blogging Trifecta Explosion!
• And no list of online resources would be complete without the fabulous group of writers that brought us WriteOnCon!  Though I was in Ireland during the conference, I have browsed through some of the recaps and I’m continually amazed at all the wealth of information that’s there.
• Don’t forget also to look up professional writer organizations.  I found this list of Writers Associations that looks to be pretty good.  At the very least, it can serve as a jumping off point.

For those who are new at following blogs, one great tip I got from my friend and fellow blogger, Ghenet, was to signup for Google Reader.  If you have a gmail account then you essentially already have it, you just have to set it up.  As you subscribe to blogs using RSS feeds, the blogs will appear in your reader, allowing you to browse all the new posts of the day in one screen.  Kind of like a newspaper.

Long-term Goals: if you don’t already have Google Reader (or something like it), set it up and start connecting with different blogs.  If you’ve been resisting Twitter, consider setting up an account, even if all you do at first is follow tweets.

Today’s Task: Since we’re talking about community, today we’re doing a group project!  Please share in the comments which online communities or resources you visit and tell us why you find them especially useful.  If we all pitch in together and give one or two unique answers, we can collectively put together a comprehensive list of online communities and resources.  Later in the month, I’ll go back through the comments, add some more links and put together a user-friendly Resources list to post at the end of DIY MFA.

OK, enough about goal-setting.  We’ll probably come back to concrete goals and holy grails now and again, but today there’s something else I want to talk about: community.

There’s something about writers that makes them flock together.  This isn’t just a new phenomenon either.  Think of the Abbey Theater in Dublin or the Algonquin Round Table in New York.  Writers just seem to find each other, as if through instinct.  And yet, unlike many other arts, writing in itself is a very solitary activity; after all, no amount of community will sit down and write that novel for you.  Why then, if the bulk of the work must be done on one’s own, is community such an important part of a writer’s life?

1. It will keep you sane.  Belonging to a group of like-minded writers will help keep you centered during those moments of solitary madness (and we all have those from time to time).  Whether this community is a critique group or an online network, having other writers around will keep the lonelies from creeping up.
2. It will keep you accountable.  Writers know when other writers are working and when they’re just blowing steam.  If you have writer friends who ask you about your work, it will help keep you honest.  After all, there’s only so many times you can say to another writer “well, uh, I’m still stuck on chapter 3…” before you start losing your street cred and start looking like an @$$.
3. It will give you perspective.  Sometimes it feels like everyone else in the world is getting published except for you and that’s because the whole publishing universe is out to get you and make you feel worse than pond scum.  Um… not.  Seeing other writers try and fail will help remind you of reality: writing is hard work, but worth every bit of it.
4. You’ll have someone to commiserate with you.  Let’s face it, writing is tough and publishing is too.  Sometimes we all need a good sulk and having a community will mean you’ll have a built-in network of people who can sympathize.  These are people who won’t give you weird looks when you tell them that you hear your characters’ voices in your head or that a minor character just hijacked your entire plot.  These are the people who will pat you on the back before they give you that loving shove back to the computer.
5. Finally, it means you’ll have someone to celebrate with you.  And these are people who will understand that finishing a short story is just as much reason for celebration as getting a publishing contract, that it’s just as important to celebrate the small successes as the big ones.  They know because they’ve been there too.

Over the next few weeks Tuesdays will be our day for focusing on building a writer’s community.  Not every type of community works for every writer.  Some of us prefer live, face-to-face meetings with a critique group.  For others of us, conferences, writing organizations or classes might be great places to connect with fellow writers.  And let’s not forget the wonders of the internet.  These days you can do almost anything online that you could do live: exchange critique, take classes, even have face-to-face conferences via webcam.

In Creative Community we’ll be looking at a few of these options–their pros and cons–and how to make the most of these various communities.  By the end of it, my hope is that everyone will have the tools to find the right community for them, if they haven’t already.  And if at the end of September you find that community is not for you, well then maybe you’re one of those rare birds that just likes to fly solo.

And that’s totally OK.

Today’s Question: Do you think writers need community?  If so, what do you think is the most important thing writers can get out of connecting with other writers?