When Melanie Pappadis Faranello sent me an email in 2012, I had no idea it would be the beginning of an enduring literary friendship. She had just moved to my town in Connecticut and was looking for connections. I haven’t met any writers in the area yet and would love to get an idea of what the community is like here, she wrote. As a relative newcomer myself, I didn’t have many local literary connections, so we met up for coffee, and then we formed a writing group with a few other writers.

In the early days, we met in person, usually at someone’s house, where we spent a couple of hours discussing one another’s work. We wrote short stories, novels, essays — squeezing writing time into our busy professional and parenting lives — with each scheduled meeting serving as an impetus to get our work done. We gave each other deadlines and held one another accountable. We couldn’t let our writing friends down.

Over the years, the membership of the group changed. A couple of writers departed, and a couple others joined. Melanie and I remained, urging each other on, championing one another’s work, celebrating publication in journals and other victories.

Then, in fall of 2019, I left Connecticut for the Midwest, and it seemed that our group might be at an end. We promised to keep meeting over Zoom, but I don’t think any of us were certain that would happen. But then, when we went into lockdown during the pandemic, suddenly everyone was Zooming for work, for school, for companionship, so it felt natural to continue our meetings in that virtual space.

The benefits of maintaining a writing group are numerous: My writing friends keep me writing (even when I don’t think I have the time), they provide me with valuable feedback on my works-in-progress, they encourage me when things seem bleak, and they celebrate my triumphs — and I try to do the same for them.

One of these major triumphs occurred earlier this year, when Melanie and I had our new books come out on the same day. Then, we met up at the AWP Bookfair in Baltimore, where we signed our books at the same booth. (My collection of essays, The Season of Birds and Stones, was published by the University of Georgia Press, and Melanie’s award-winning collection of short stories, Everybody Needs Something, is being distributed by the same press.)

Many of the essays and stories that make up our books owe their final, polished form to the careful critiques of our writing group provided during years of hard work. Little did we know, back in 2012, that we were embarking on a lasting partnership that would eventually lead our books to share a birthday.

Our next meeting is scheduled in just a few weeks. I’ll be joining Melanie, Erin, and Aimee over Zoom. We’ll chat briefly about summer travels or about our (mostly grown) children, and then we’ll get down to the work of discussing one another’s submissions — which means I have a deadline coming up. It’s time to write.   

Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of the essay collections The Season of Birds and Stones and Xylotheque, and a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska.