Tuesday Night Writers at Work

If there is a heaven, Stephanie Moore surely takes a break from whatever she’s doing up there to look down on a Corte Madera kitchen every other Tuesday night. That’s when one of the many writing groups she led continues her legacy by meeting on their own, as they have since her death from ovarian cancer in 2006.

This is no wanna-be group. Tanya Egan Gibson’s first novel, How to Buy a Love of Reading, was published in 2009 and came out in paperback a year later. Chris Cole and Amanda Conran have manuscripts with or on the way to big publishing houses. One of Jill Rosenblum Tidman’s short stories just received a “special mention” among the esteemed Pushcart Press prizes.

John Philipp, who writes a humor column for the Marinscope papers, was recently named one of the top three in his field by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and is going strong on a novel, as is Jon Wells. Cyndi Cady has published several short stories, one was a finalist in New Southerner magazine’s 2010 fiction contest, and was one of the six performers at the Why There Are Words reading series in Sausalito June 9. (The other Tuesday Night Writers, who weren’t there the night I visited, are Tom Joyce, Maya Lis Tussing, and David Winton.)

Most of the Tuesday Night Writers worked with Moore for five or six years, and they learned her lessons well. Although “everything was a little more structured under Stephanie,” says Wells, the evening follows a certain pattern. “We meet, we greet, we lay out the food,” says Conran, in whose cozy kitchen the group gathers. “We hug, we kiss, we start to eat,” adds Cole, “and as soon as we realize we’re talking in a group, we do a check-in.” By that, he means they share recent literary activity: “what you’ve done, what you haven’t done and why, what you’ve sent off” to a magazine or book publisher, Philipp explains.

Moore would always talk about a specific aspect of writing — character, description, time — and read and discuss a prime example. Then, with that prompt in mind, the group would write for 20-30 minutes, using the characters or setting from their own work-in-progress when possible. “I got the germ of my book from a prompt,” says Wells, who’s working on a novel set in Vietnam.

“I got the germs of four stories,” says Tidman. “If not from the prompt, the passage read would trigger something for me.”

Today the prompts tend to come from Conran or Gibson, who also remind the group when it’s time to stop scribbling and start reading aloud. “Every single time,” says Cole, “someone will start by saying, ‘This sucks, but ...’” And like Moore, someone else will say, “We’ll be the judge of that.”

"Because we’re so comfortable with each other,” adds Gibson, “we’ll take a bigger chance in the work because we want to make each other laugh.”

“That’s part of Stephanie’s legacy, too,” says Wells. “You didn’t just read, you performed.”

”When I’m here,” says Gibson, “I want to go big — and a lot of the weird things I’ve tried made it into my book.”

Once the prompted pieces have been critiqued, three or four people read a few pages from their ongoing work. “I haven’t had the courage,” Wells confesses, “to put anything into my book that I haven’t read here.”

Speaking of performing, you can hear what many group members are up to during their readings, every two months at Peri’s bar, in Fairfax. Readers have included guests such as Molly Giles (Creek Walk and Other Stories) and ZYZZYVA lit-magazine founder Howard Junker. There’s always an open-mic, too. The next meeting is July 19, so there’s time to work on something to read there, even if the Tuesday Night Writers won’t be able to critique it first.