My Accidental Fall Tradition

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

Fall has finally arrived, and with it, a few of my favorite things: cool mornings, autumn scents, sweaters and boots, Halloween. No one really needs an excuse for bingeing on ghost stories for an entire month, but the long nights of October provide one anyway.

Another fall tradition I look forward to is Mothers Who Write, a ten-week writing workshop that I stumbled upon in 2011 and have taken nearly every year since. Before then, when I was still an unpublished author scribbling mostly in secret, I had no writing community and no idea what I was missing.

Mothers Who Write is structured so participants draft a two-page piece every week to a prompt, then read the piece aloud the following week for critique. There’s a deep level of trust involved with sharing our stories, but even more so when those stories are still being written. In the early stages of drafting, we know our ideas are imperfect, our sentences messy, our words unrefined—but in a room where we are all equally vulnerable, we share them anyway.

And by November, we’ve shared plenty of other things too: lots of laughter, a few tears, some pie recipes, and—because we’re mothers—probably pictures of our children. I’ve met so many extraordinary women in that class.

I’ve also come to embrace the form of flash fiction and essays. Having a 2-page limit forces you to pare a story down to its essence, and there’s an increasing market for works of brevity like these. Of the dozens of pieces I’ve written in Mothers Who Write, eleven have gone on to publication, and all three of my publications this year were started in workshop last fall.

One is a fictional story about a girl struggling through adolescence, one is an essay about a failed attempt to reconnect with my mother, and one is a reflection on my son’s tendency toward nostalgia and his ambivalence about growing older.

The best writing workshops are filled with a sense of anticipation, familiarity, and belonging. Just like the best traditions of fall.