and Lilacs and goats, and I startled deer, horses, a squirrel rolling in the sand, and a Gray Racer, slithering across the road. And I never felt alone. (Cheryl is away on a training gig.)

Writing can feel lonely sometimes, but for me, the solitude is the key ingredient, the quiet. When I carve out the time to focus on gears shifting on a bike, or word choice, like “mud clotted with rocks in root balls,” not “mud clods and rocks stuck…” in a poem about the burn pile, the space opens in me for connection. That attention to the present allows creativity, gratitude, hope, pain, forgiveness to align like bones.

In that space to create over the past ten years, a story moved through me. At the pinewood table with Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose and so many other brave writers years ago, I walked into fiction. With many different people since then, I’ve connected those words, felt the healing process of writing about the trauma of my first year of teaching, a year in a boarding school in Delaware, that was so difficult it sent me running away from the East Coast, leaving everything behind.

Writing this novel with different groups of people, with readers who were kind and direct, like Hannah Tinti, Minton Sparks, Jackie Shannon-Hollis, Cecily Portman, sending it out to agents and publishers for their comments and rejection, reading it page-by-page to a group of dear friends last summer, rewriting it last fall, obeying Cheryl’s commands to “go write,” has taught me about endurance and faith and luck. Writing fiction for publication is a long-distance event. People make it possible. I’m the one who has to put in the miles, do the hills.

Forest Avenue Press, the brain child of Laura Stanfill, is going to publish that novel, Skin Drag. If ever there were a book written by a community, this is it. So many people helped to write it. While I may have sought solitude to connect words to the page, I was never lonely. And writing it helped me heal the utter loneliness of the real events buried in the fiction.

Thank you, writers, friends, readers, agents, publishers, Laura (you can read her press release here). Thanks for your faith. Skin Drag will be something for your hands to hold in September, 2014.

In the Q & A portion of the Brave on the Page reading at Powell’s in early January, someone asked if a writer should join a group. One audience member felt writing groups were a waist of time. Some are. Some break poems over their knees for the sheer pleasure of breaking. Some whitewash the pain out of stories. But then, there’s the one or two that fit, like cashmere sweaters just the right size. They’re hard to find. They’re hard to create.

Here’s a profile of one of the groups that tastes like sweet corn soup on a February day:

–the Dangerous Writers in Portland began with a few charismatic leaders, bent on bending rules, indoctrinating eager, vulnerable writers with a new vocabulary and new rules.

–the members were ferociously dedicated, meeting each week, and making sacrifices to be there (some folks spent so much time writing to make the weekly page count that they didn’t eat enough, didn’t meet daily obligations.)

–the responses in the group to writing were stars drawn over words doing their work, spicy and seductive, with discussion of the “bumps,” so gently put and so honest that the writer felt powerful enough to gather feedback, to ignore feedback, and to keep rolling down the lane with feedback as a bumper.

–the group socialized outside of writing time, with invitations sent to everyone in the group.

–to change things up, there were annual parties and annual writing challenges.

–sporadically, news of publications and honors went out, with each person published willing to share his/her connections or queries or websites or process.

–people showed up, for each other, for readings and weddings and hospital visits.

–resources like agents and web skills and toboggans were shared.

–rules about how to write fiction (first person, personal, etc.) that the group started with changed as the group opened up and changed tables and grew, and the writing opened up and grew.

And what’s grown is a community, one connected by email and Evite and fireworks in Estacada. We don’t all write together around the same tables. We don’t write the same things. We don’t live in the same place. Even someone who has moved to San Francisco, who has just received news that he has lymphoma, can reach out and ask the dangerous writing community for book recommendations, can ask for laughter and for a 57-word flash fiction piece that includes a word from his chemo regimen. And he will get books and writing and love. It’s that kind of group. It’s that kind of love.