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Guest post by Kim Golden
Picture this: a scruffy sports bar in Richmond, Virginia in the early 1990s. A group of young writers talking shop over pitchers of Sam Adams and bowls of greasy fries. We are all drunk on youth, on beer, on the freedom to write when and where we want. The warm summer night air is heavy with promise—of words written and words to write, of sex, of stories longing to be told. And yet…we didn’t care. Or perhaps we did, and just didn’t understand the gift we’d been given.
Back then, we could spend all day, all night, writing and talking about writing. As students in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, we spent our mornings teaching or working in the Writing Center, our afternoons in cafés or in seminars, our evenings in creative writing workshops, and our nights in various bars imitating the writers we admired, writing drunk, editing sober. We took for granted that our lives would always be like this. I think we all imagined we’d continue our careers in the academia, teaching classes, hopefully on tenure track at some point, with our summers always free for road trips or writing in parks. The idea of having to balance our lives—of actually needing to carve out time for writing—never occurred to us. And most of the time, we wasted all of those precious hours when we could have been writing—we were too busy with our social lives or talking about writing instead of simply writing.
Now fast forward fifteen-odd years.
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