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.
Visit our Patreon page to learn more about Plume’s affordable membership. Our podcast is available for free on all major podcast platforms.
Become a Plume Patron. Get access to our exclusive online writing community on Slack, bonus podcast content, and more.
Crystal K. Odelle
Jenn Givhan has an infectious, delightful personality. So much so, that sometimes I forget I’ve never actually met her in person! I feel like I have because she is such a force in her writing and in her online presence (and also because she helped me out and covered several of my classes when I left work to have a baby!). We are delighted to share some of Jenn’s singular voice with you, and here is your first taste. Enjoy the interview! Plume: When did you know you were a writer? Jenn Givhan: When I was a little girl, though, looking back, I probably wasn’t all that remarkable—I mean, a person might not have known I showed any promise. Even when I look at my poems and stories from when I was in my early twenties, truly, they weren’t technically different than other college-student writing. Growing up though, I lied quite a bit, partly as survival skill through a traumatic girlhood, and partly because, I realize now, I was becoming a writer. Back then, when I was maybe seven, I said I was going to be a writer, and my mom looked up from her textbook because she was studying to be a nurse and said I absolutely would be, and my dad looked up from his science textbook because he was a high school teacher, and said I would write the elusive great American novel, though I didn’t know anything then about the patriarchy and the male-dominated cannon and the problematic ideology underpinning the idea of a great American novel in the first place. I just said I was going to do something, and my parents said, yes you will, though in our tiny, rural, desert community on the Mexicali border, there were no creative writing workshops or poetry slams or any kind of networking that I knew how to access or that my parents encouraged me toward. So I wrote in my public school classes, in my journals and diaries, and in the survival stories I told to get me through. It was just the unshakeable belief that I had stories to tell that kept me going with very little encouragement on any practical level until I met a teacher in my grad program where I was earning my master’s in English at Cal State Fullerton, and she saw the spark in me and helped usher me into … Read more
