by Lisbeth Coiman
Writing Alone Together is a community of writers who share the need of time dedicated exclusively to their craft. We are writers needing accountability in the long hours of a pandemic, when days melt into each other like a plastic spoon left unattended sticking to the metal edges of a hot grill.
By the end of March 2020, I couldn’t tell night from day anymore, the constant rain in those early days of the lockdown, and the grey sky, thick like a sun-blocking curtain, added despair to the two weeks of silence and solitude inside my apartment in Inglewood.
As usual, I reached for structure, the backbone of my sanity, blocking time for exercise, nourishment, chores, and work. But the lack of accountability to meet my writing goals put in jeopardy my ambitious plan to complete a bilingual collection of poetry before summer. Without the pressure of a concrete deadline, or the constraints of time spent on traffic and work, I ran the risk of retreating into my mind and surrendering to the overwhelming weight of the pandemic anxiety.
As a desperate selfish act of reconnecting with people who share my interests, I threw the idea of meeting daily for three hours in the morning in the abstraction of Zoom meetings to write in silence with fellow women writers. And just like that a community was born: Writing Alone Together (WAT). Initially four women joined me. WAT has now 40 members, and keeps growing slowly, with several small independent groups stemming from the idea.
A simple concept, WAT offers a safe cyberspace, structure, and a maximum of 15 minutes to chat before we silence our mics and write our souls out.
WAT is dependent of Women Who Submit, and accepts only WWS members who are committed to write. We meet now twice daily from 10 to 12 pm and from 4 to 6 p.m. That’s four hours of uninterrupted writing for women who are used to steal time from domestic and professional duties. We have already learned from the constrains of life outside cyberspace to optimize time, and therefore, have become incredibly productive with these extra hours of work. Regular attendees have shared their success stories and make us all proud of what we can collectively achieve when we join forces.
WAT is building a community of women and non-binary writers exposed to the overwhelming conditions of 2020. We support and hold space for each other. We sometimes shed tears and try to reassure those who seem to be given in to the weight of our current common circumstances. And we write, silently in 2 hour segments, daily from Monday to Friday.
The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic with its potential of killing so many of us, together with racial tensions stemming for the contemporary lynching of people of color, protests, the threat of our country turning to totalitarianism, the effects of global warming destroying our landscape, homelessness, unemployment, all post a high risk to our physical and mental health, to democracy and way of life. But 2020 has also been a year of relearning life, learning to live, study, teach, communicate, and perform in cyberspace. Thus, we survive.
This is not the time to judge ourselves for selfish attempts of survival. Not all selfish acts are altruistic, but true altruism is in itself a selfish act, especially when in doing so, we reach for the nearest hand to survive with us. Selfishness knows no moral. It only turns bad if it causes the destruction of others. It turns good when a selfish act benefits those around us. Today, I am proud of the community created from my desperate attempt to survive writing during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020.
Thank you to those who co-host when I cannot open the room: Colette Sartor, Cybele Garcia Cohel, Thea Pueschel, Deborah Elder Brown, Sakae Manning, and of course to the 40 other female writers who have come regularly or occasionally to join us in our adventure. Thank you to all who continue to hold each other in this cyber space.
Lisbeth Coiman is an emerging, bilingual writer wandering the immigration path from Venezuela to Canada to the US. She has performed any available job from maid to college administrator, and adult teacher. Her work has been published in Hip Mama, the Literary Kitchen, YAY LA, Nailed Magazine, Entropy, and RabidOak. She was also featured in the Listen to Your Mother Show in 2015. In her self-published memoir, I Asked the Blue Heron (Nov 2017), Coiman celebrates female friendship while exploring issues of child abuse, mental disorder, and her own journey as an immigrant. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches ESL and dances salsa.