Back in the early ’90s, I was a stay-at-home mom of a toddler and a preschooler. Whenever I could, I found time to write—mostly about the kids and their antics. I wrote those personal essays, then tucked them into a floppy disk and forgot about them. I could almost hear the disks rebuke me: Why aren’t you trying to get us published? What good are we sitting in the dark? And it’s getting cramped in here.
One day, in November 1994, I stood chatting with another mom where our kids attended preschool. She asked if I wanted to join a writers group that met monthly at rotating homes around Philadelphia and the Main Line. I jumped on it. The group I joined assumed the name PlayPen, a nod to our young kids we sometimes brought along and in whose tiny hands we thrust crayons and cookies so we could talk about our writing projects and the places we hoped to publish them.
In those early writing years, my skin was see-through, so criticism was hard to take—especially on subjects as close to me as my kids. Yet I had rarely received criticism, since, until I joined the writers group, my loved ones were my only audience, and they were awfully supportive. Yes, I loved them for it, but I knew that to become the writer I wanted to be, I had to thicken my hide and hear some harder truths about my writing from people who were not related to me.
But I didn’t know if I would have anything to contribute to a writers group. At 29 when I joined, I was its youngest member, and I worried that my lack of publications (nothing other than undergrad film reviews in my college’s newspaper) made me unqualified to participate. A half-dozen years before, I had sat mute in a writing workshop for the same reason. What did I have to say? What help could I offer other writers? Well, it turns out that we loved writing about our experiences as parents, turning out often humorous, always relatable (to parents) slice-of-life stories to share at our meetings. Before long, my voice and confidence emerged in what grew to be a safe space to share my writing. I continue to feel that, as women of a certain age, within about 10 years of each other, and as mothers whose time was often in short supply during our kids’ growing up years, we made it our objective to create this safe space to bring our work.
Joining the group didn’t launch my writing into the national consciousness, but I did feel an early surge of bravery and sent an essay or two to a local newspaper. And to my delight, they published my piece about sitting Shiva for a family member. It was one of those personal essays I had written when my firstborn was napping, and then tucked the piece away for its own long nap. That first publication further emboldened me to offer other members of the group my thoughts on their work and to keep trying to get my own writing published.
Within a couple of years of my joining PlayPen, our group’s founder, Joyce, assigned some of us articles to write for the Jewish Exponent’s monthly magazine supplement, for which she was the editor. I learned how to write for an audience, how to consider structure, length and theme, and I gained a purpose for my writing; now I had a subject matter for each piece, something Joyce assigned. I contributed personal essays about my then four-generation family, my 91-year-old grandfather’s Bar Mitzvah, and features about Jewish community events. Bolstered by Joyce’s and the group’s confidence in my writing, I looked for and published in other markets, too, both regional and national. We all did. She offered that confidence to all of us when she assigned and edited our pieces, trusting in return that we would give her quality work.
As important as the writers group was to me, there were years when I didn’t attend. Years when I said, “yes, I’ll be there!” and then I simply couldn’t make it. As I had a third child and my kids got older, I eventually returned to the workforce. Soon after, in 2004, I lost my sibling in a tragic accident. I returned to school for a graduate degree, then started teaching writing. Family, school, and work had almost completely supplanted PlayPen. Rare were the months I could make our meetings, but I took comfort in knowing the group endured. My peers welcomed me back whenever I did show up, so I never truly felt distant from this group of women. Occasionally, I encountered a new face among the familiar, and by now, cherished regulars. Those new faces are now cherished regulars, too.
Belonging to a mutually supportive group of writers has spurred us all on in many writerly directions—from published memoir, fiction, marketing, and mainstream journalism, to playwriting and screenwriting. We have learned what makes each of us tick as a writer, what our strengths and styles are. Whether or not I bring something to share with the group, I always look forward to the work others bring for comment, to the writing markets they share, and to hearing about their own literary projects.
The PlayPen writers group is still going strong 25 years after my friend and fellow writer/mom invited me to join the group. We still serve each other breakfast when we take turns hosting, and we still share our work, writing venues, and life’s tales around the table. Our kids have grown and gone—some of them making us grandparents. Technological changes have turned our writers group from a monthly gathering planned via snail mail to a group that supports its members 24/7 through our Facebook page updates on writing markets and on our individual accomplishments. And we still meet once a month on a Friday to talk shop and nudge each other forward in our writing and publishing. At this point, I can’t imagine a world without this writers group. We have grown together.
Cassandra Krivy Hirsch is the author of a historical novel, Under the Linden Tree, and is Associate Teaching Professor of English at Drexel University. For most of the last few decades, she has written freelance pieces for various regional publications, and is currently working on another novel, this one set in contemporary Philadelphia.