Writing News

I'm lucky and so grateful to have found a group of writers to share feedback with—all of my best work has benefitted from their critiques.

 

We first met in online classes at The Writer's Studio in 2022, and in the past three years we've had fifty-six Zoom calls together (56!!), organised into seven sessions of eight meetings. After each session we take a break of a few months to write, building up material for the next session. Our meetings are on every second Tuesday at midday Pacific time, hence the name: The Tuesday Tutorials. As writers we know each other well—our themes, the experiences we draw on, our writing styles—but there are considerable gaps in what we know about the rest of each others' lives. Most of us have never met in person.

 

There are eight of us, seven writers and our writing coach Lael Cassidy, formerly a teacher at The Writer's Studio. We pay Lael for her time, and she keeps the bar high for the closeness of our reading and the quality of our feedback. We've learned how to give good feedback, and that's helped each of us to look at our own work more critically.

 

At the moment I'm the only one in the group who is writing short stories—in the other six are four novelists and two poets. I'm in Montreal in Canada, while everyone else is south of the border in New York, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State. Some of the folks on the west coast have met in person, and we like to think that we'll all meet up some day. Chicago is nicely in the middle, though I'm a reluctant visitor to the US these days.

 

Session 8 begins at the end of January 2026. I'm really looking forward to it—I've got several new pieces that I know will benefit from their feedback. 

 

With gratitude to Jamie, Lindsey, Lynne K, Lynne S, Sabine, Sharon, and of course Lael. See you soon guys!