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What’s The First Rule of Critique Club?
Talk about the writing, not the behavior — it’s elementary
The fourth member of our writing group joined the meeting over a half-hour late, with no apologies. She sent an email prior to the meeting, saying she had to take her dog to the vet.
“No worries,” we told her. “It’s all fine.” And it was, until she crossed the line.
I had laid eyes on this woman, who appeared old enough to be my mother, only once before — in the previous week’s meeting. We got acquainted then, an assembly of strangers gathering on Zoom for a professional critique group facilitated by a women’s writing organization.
The projects we were working on varied, and each of the four participants in our group had their own style and voice.
In the kickoff meeting, we critiqued two essays — one by a lifelong athlete who wrote about her experiences with pregnancy, the other by the woman who was late the following week. We reviewed the athlete’s blend of poetry and memoir, snippets of memories she planned to turn into a novel of sorts. The group member who was late, I’ll call her the Critic, submitted a piece about her mother’s death.
If it’s terrifying submitting work to a bunch of strangers, it’s downright petrifying to look those people in the…
