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
Our featured writer for December is Dawn Sperber! I met Dawn in the MFA program at UNM back in 2007. She has such a warm and sweet energy about her, and her writing hums with magical assuredness. We are so very excited to share her unique work with you, and we couldn’t think of a better writer to go with Plume’s Solstice theme for December. Please enjoy this interview with Dawn. Plume: When did you know you were a writer? Dawn Sperber: Fifteen, maybe? Since I was ten, I’d dreamed of being a writer when I grew up. Then, when I was fifteen, I wrote a story for a class assignment, and this short story came out of somewhere, from the perspective of a WWII Air Force fighter who falls in love with a Japanese woman who gets put in an internment camp. The story included all these details and situations I hadn’t thought of before and didn’t even know I knew. It felt uncanny that I’d written a military story, so unlike me. I loved that feeling. It was like opening a door, and anything could be revealed behind it, kind of beyond my control, even though I was the one writing it. The words got stilted and wrong if I tried to direct the story too much, but if I followed the feeling of the story, new ideas just swept me up like a current. Now and then, I’d think about how it felt to write that story. Then, when I was sixteen, I got a beautiful journal and started writing everything I could think of in it. At eighteen, I started writing every day, and I still do that. So, I guess it all changed for me at fifteen. P: Where do you get your ideas? DS: I often get story ideas from images, whether I see them in a dream or my imagination or a moment that I live. Sometimes, I write stories off of writing prompts I find in contests, whether or not I’m not interested in the contest. Other times, I pick a list of random words from the dictionary and build a story around them. Or, I’m haunted by a feeling that I want to explore and try to share; then, I have to build a world around it to make it a story. The places my stories start are often pretty different … Read more
