I lead a weekly writing group for homeless people at a local public library — an endeavor I started six months ago.
It's a thrill. Those couple hours every Tuesday are the best part of my week: inspiring, heart-wrenching, full of emotion, laughter, creativity.
But due to a schedule conflict, I can't facilitate today's group. Instead of canceling, I tapped several of the regular attendees to facilitate the morning. They'll select and bring the writing prompts, pick up the donuts and coffee and space notebooks, and shepherd a dozen others through the morning.
This makes me happy — being part of the passing of a baton and seeing the gifts that it gives to all who are involved.
Oct 29, 2024
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instructions: pick one from each group and write about it
heading to the public library in an hour to write through these with some folks who are on the streets
Jan 21, 2025
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Write every day. So no to other things in order to write.
Share what you write on here and everywhere else. Publish on a blog or a Substack, share links to your work. Don't heed the feedback all that much—good or bad. You know what's in you. Work the muscle of putting it in front of people.
Go to a public library and volunteer to start a writing workshop for an underserved group, like people facing homelessness. Write with them when they write.
Oct 24, 2024
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For example: Give yourselves one hour to write a short story.
That's what my pal and I have been doing since 2020. For awhile, we did it every Wednesday. There were periods of burnout where we did it just once every few weeks/month. At other times, we've done challenges were we did it everyday for a month (that's our practice this month of Feb). We usually audio record what we've written and share it with each other via Whatsapp (he lives in the UK).
It's a beautiful, sometimes daunting, practice. I've amassed a google doc with 100,000+ words just by showing up to do this. It's never about quality, more just a method of working things out. :-)
Feb 8, 2024
Top Recs from @mattshawsome
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this is worthy of celebration: the lack of video—autoplay video, noisy inane video, panicky video, algorithmic, dumb video, rabbit hole video, any video—on pi.fyi is a good thing
Oct 5, 2024
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this is going to hurt — A LOT — but it's getting to the point where there's no other option
Mar 11, 2025