We three met at the National Theater Institute in 2013. Elena suggested this group at the beginning of Covid as a way to cope/stay engaged/be creative/etc. We generated prompts from conversations, books of writing prompts, writing prompt generator websites, and some from Suleika Jauad's
The Isolation Journals
. Like a lot of folks, we all started many projects in 2020, but this is one of the few we all actually kept up with. We are intentional about what we're doing: we meet once a week remotely for one hour - unless someone has a conflict and we decide not to meet, or decide to meet for longer. We don't have homework - occasionally we'll "bring in an object" or pick a song to share, but there's no expectation of work being done before the meeting. When we write, we never focus on having any kind of final product - some pieces are left unfinished, and we just move on to write something else if we feel like it. Even this book is not the culmination of all our work; it comes out of wanting to celebrate what we've done so far. This whole vibe is part of why we've been able to stick with it while we fell off of other projects.
We've held these meetings on Thursdays, Sundays, Wednesdays, (but never Saturdays!) because we all work in theater and our schedules vary a lot. We are constantly changing and evolving the format: some days we invite guests, some days we play DnD, sometimes we have a plan, and other times we spend most of our time chatting. In year one, we mostly wrote from prompts and conversations, using what was happening around us and what was going on in our internal worlds. In year two, we did a lot of accountability writing - we all had other things we were working on, and used our weekly hour for that. In year three, we have expanded our structure and sources of inspiration, using more nontraditional sources to help us generate work.
We decided to make a book at this stage, because at the start of year three we looked back and realized we had generated a large amount of work. We thought it would be nice to collect some of it in one place. We had previously discussed starting a blog, which we also have done, but Ivy wanted something she could physically hold as well and Tessa and Elena said fine. We've been friends for ten years, have been writing for three, and this feels like a commemoration of both those things. Common themes emerge as we write: suburbia, dystopia, the environment, technology breakdown, love. As we write about these things, we reflect these ideas back at each other, which helps us imagine them in new and different ways. In writing this book, we hope to share some of that collaborative process with you. We invite you to read, and also to take inspiration from anything that catches your imagination.