Our mission is to build a supportive writing community for women and non-binary writers. We write. We share inspiration. We encourage. Together, we create an energizing community space for writers:
- Plume: A Writer’s Podcast: Our podcast features successful women and non-binary writers, from emerging writers to bestselling novelists and award-winning poets. Our conversations and literary roundtables showcase hard-working talented writers, as we seek advice, insight, and inspiration to bring us back to our collective community. Along the way, our goal is to help writers believe in their voices and projects.
- Our Weekly Drop-in Zoom Group: Now in its third year, this is a virtual drop-in support group, where writers check in about current projects and share writing challenges and triumphs. We also write together in response to a new writing prompt each week.
- Our Plume Slack Channel: This is an online virtual space where women and non-binary writers can share resources, ask questions, connect with other writers, share writing prompts and projects, and offer and receive support in a safe, private space.
- Plume’s Monthly Accountability Group: Plume’s newest community-building addition, the Accountability Group, is designed for writers tackling large-scale writing projects. We meet to set goals, discuss strategies, offer encouragement, and help hold ourselves and each other accountable.
Through Plume’s literary community, we seek to uplift, showcase, and encourage women and non-binary writers wherever they are on their creative writing journey. We’re here to fan each other’s flames.
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Crystal K. Odelle
Nora Hickey is a triple threat writer. When I met her, she was getting her MFA in poetry at UNM, she has since published some gripping creative nonfiction (some of which you can read if you subscribe to Plume for February!), and right now she’s hard at work on a novel with a plucky protagonist named Maud. She read from this manuscript at a Plume event earlier this year, and it was both riotously funny and heart-wrenching. Nora’s writing is the real deal. We are so pleased to have her as our featured Plume writer for February. We hope you enjoy our interview with her! Plume: When did you know you were a writer? Nora Hickey: I wrote a lot about dogs growing up so didn’t really see writing as something that was a place where I could survive – where I could confront the dark woods of myself, and our world, and emerge knowing more about the place than I did before. I think writing became more crucial for me in my senior year of college. My post-college years were when I thought maybe I could actually do it, make it a part of my life. P: Where do you get your ideas? Nora Hickey: Oh, boy, that’s an interesting one…I think, for me, it’s really hard to trace the genesis of stuff in my work – well, I should say that I can usually point to specific aspects that appear – it might be something like dusk, a daily occurrence, and I start to wonder why does it hold such potency? Every day? And then I may start thinking about dusk and dawn, and wondering if there is a moment when each could be confused for the other, and then I think about sundowning and that psychological mechanism, and in that cloud of thought a line strikes me – “the confusion of dusk” – and a poem or story or scene might build from there. Because I love kernels of something that could become metaphor – could signify some sort of emotional experience – I gravitate towards my concise encyclopedia, print books I have in my bookshelves, taking walks and making myself notice what’s happening around me. Then, I’ll go write down things that strike me and revisit them when needed. P: Where do you write? NH: Home or a studio without internet when I can get it! … Read more
