Roundup: Conversations and Collaborations Among Writers

As we launch a new blog format for the new year, we’re also looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. Our roundups explore the archives and gather past posts around a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week we have posts on conversations and collaborations among writers.

Much has been professed about the nature of writers – that they are solitary creatures, or instead, ones that require community to fuel their work. Of course, there isn’t a definitive answer, and many writers are both. So let’s not generalize. As the great Mark Twain once put it, “All generalizations are false, including this one.”

Please enjoy these posts about writers connecting with other writers:

• “Who Is Your Writing Family?” examines why having a writing family is so important for writers. Do you have a writing family?

• In this post, Alicia Jo Rabins explores the advantages of writers forming a creative partnership in Torah study, a “form of obsessive, passionate relation with words and meaning,” where it’s common to work in pairs.

• Catherine Carter revisits Ovid’s Metamorphoses as she grapples with the idea of “too many applicants and not enough awards” in the arts. Is it worth it to lose a colleague’s friendship over a writing contest?

• Here, Carol Keely delves into Conversations with Walker Percy (part of the Literary Conversations Series) as she draws inspiration from discussions with writers like Borges and Faulkner.
• Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells us how joy is part of her process as a writer and discusses her book Life on Mars with Michael Klein.
• With submissions now open again for our Emerging Writer’s Contest, we take a look back at an interview with Thomas Lee, the contest’s first winner.

• Karolin Felix, the cover artist for our very first Pshares Solo, talks about her belief in ghosts, her Polish roots, and more in this interview.

• To read more great Pshares interviews, check out our compilation of them on our blog.

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