a website & community for women who write & blog
Writing is a communal act.
Now you may be thinking, “No, it’s not! We must write in solitude to produce our best work.”
But as Natalie Goldberg says in her book Writing Down the Bones, “Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill of fire. We are arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind.”
In other words, everything we write is somehow influenced by the work of writers who have come before us.
But it goes even deeper than that.
I sometimes call myself an accidental entrepreneur, even though a part of me has always wanted to own my own business. In fact, as a kid, I started a “boutique” in my bedroom and tried to convince family members and friends to buy purses and costume jewelry I no longer wanted.
Nonetheless, it would be a blog, not a boutique, that would be the start of my first real business.
When I returned to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in 2009 to teach I immediately knew I wanted to surround myself with creative women who write. For two years I searched for a networking group for women writers that would welcome bloggers, poets, journalists, and creative nonfiction writers (all hats I’d worn at some point in my writing life), but to no avail. Finally, in 2011 I decided to start one of my own and See Jane Write was born. My little writing group is now an award-winning business and website. I am so proud of what I’ve built over the past 7 years, but if I had to do it all again there are some things I would do differently. Here are some confessions about my See Jane Write journey.