Choose Your People Carefully: Who You Walk Beside Will Shape Your Life and Your Art
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Dunbar's number
10 min read
The essay explores the profound impact of close creative friendships and literary community. Dunbar's number - the cognitive limit on stable social relationships - provides scientific context for why these carefully chosen inner-circle relationships matter so much more than broad networking.
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Ragdale
11 min read
Directly mentioned in the article as a residency that Gina recommended for the author. Readers would benefit from understanding the history and significance of artist residencies like Ragdale in nurturing creative communities.
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Association of Writers & Writing Programs
12 min read
AWP 2022 in Philadelphia is mentioned as the site of a pivotal connection. Understanding what AWP is and its role in literary community-building directly illuminates the essay's themes about writer friendships forming through institutional gatherings.
Hi, writers,
Happy Friday. I’m thrilled today to share with you a beautiful essay from my friend and colleague, Gina Frangello, who writes here about how we choose the people we walk with, and the enormous impact that has on our lives. Gina published this essay first through ’s Substack, in part as a way to introduce me to that community as we launch the new CRAFT SCHOOL creative writing school and community together.
I’ve known Gina since 2021, when we both had new memoirs out, and I loved Gina’s (Blow Your House Down). So, I reached out and told her so, and invited her to do a reading with. me, even though we were only connected via social media. She quickly agreed, because Gina is like that: open, generous, and prone to saying yes. Through Gina, I’ve gotten to know Emily Rapp Black, whose work I have admired and taught since at least 2014. So, last fall, I reached out to Emily to write the foreword for the narrative health anthology project underway through the U of M.
As a writer who wrote alone for most of my writing life, and only in the last decade started working intentionally and consistently to build literary community and make close personal writing friends, I know firsthand how vast the difference is. The thing about writer friends is, they are not only supportive and encouraging and excellent at commiserating, but, also, they help each other. Back at AWP 2022 in Philadelphia, after a reading I had invited Gina to participate in, she recommended me for a residency at Ragdale. And when my book was on submission recently, Emily reached out with the names of a half dozen major editors she thought might be interested, with an accompanying offer to make an introduction.
They say love makes the world go round, and their not wrong, but it’s equally true that writer friends spin the globe. There is no other way. An email here, a comment there, a post about a book, an hour on Zoom, and the next thing you know everything changes. This, this is the power of community and why I am so passionate about literary citizenship and building and sustaining communities for writers.
It’s my honor today to introduce you to two of the very best.
First, though, a couple of housekeeping notes: I’ll be posting again on Monday,
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.