Thank you!
Ask No. 2: Among the ravages wrought by COVID-19 are
the hundreds of writing workshops, festivals, conferences, and meetup groups that were forced on hiatus and never came back.
For more than a decade we've maintained a state-by-state list of writing organizations: Conferences, workshops, retreats, festivals, reading series, literary mags, and casual critique
groups.
These pages come so much in handy for writers looking for community, particularly if they've just relocated to a new state.
Last week I started going through those state pages to sniff out dead groups, dead links. It was even worse than I feared. So many have gone out of business permanently that some of these state pages are down to only a handful of resources.
Anything writing-related will do, so long as it has a website. (Meetup.com is OK; Facebook is not.)
And then I'll refill those pages, until the next years-long pandemic cleans the slate again. Just reply to this email with whatever resources you want us to
add.
That's it for this week. I'm very thankful for your time.
Next week, in a new Query Qorner, we'll be looking at the query letter
that locked down an agent for our ol' pal Yi Shun Lai, whose debut YA novel, A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic, is releasing Tuesday from Simon &
Schuster.
I'll probably also have to talk about AI and how I underwent a ChatGPT tutorial to see if it has any merit for world-building.
Pretty soon,
AI will be writing this newsletter. If it's not doing so already?
