Today is Monday. For over a year, I spent almost every Monday night meeting with two other writers, one I’d been in grad school with when we were both pursuing our MFA’s in poetry and one my grad school buddy introduced me to at a local woman’s bookstore. We stopped meeting regularly last fall. I mourned the loss and welcomed it. We had all gotten to a point where we had projects to work on that didn’t fit into the format of our group. We needed time to write instead of meeting about writing. But when the group started, it offered me exactly what I needed.

I wanted a writing focus. My poetry brain disappeared about the time I got pregnant. The burgeoning being in my belly pulled me to the earth, asked me to pay attention to what was right in front of me, to look at the world for what it was instead of trying to make it into something else. No comparisons. No metaphors. No evaluative hindsight. As helpful a practice as this is for living in the present moment, I have felt un-moored since then. My way of processing the world, both by writing poems and performing them, was lost. How was I going to find my way back to myself or to who I was becoming now?

I hoped the writing group would do it. We took turns submitting work and having it workshopped. I brought poems I’d wanted to revise since grad school. Then children’s stories. Then essays. Just reminding myself every week that I was a writer, that the way I operate in the world is by putting things down on paper, helped me. Here I am, Sonya Savitri Fehér. I write. I read other writers. I offer my evaluation of their work. I know how to do this. Every week, a reminder of who I’d been for the last two decades. We set intentions for the following meeting: I will write, submit, edit …. We reviewed our goals from the previous week. Had we achieved what we’d hoped? What work was there left to do? Each time the group gave me a way of moving forward, one goal, one week at a time.

It took months for me to build up to it, but eventually I began transcribing the memoir of my pregnancy with generalized anxiety disorder. I had 300 pages. The group read some of it and offered comments. Then we started readying for the annual Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference. I read about how to pitch my book. I left my son for the longest blocks I’d been away since his birth: Friday night, eleven hours on Saturday, another seven on Sunday. I met with agents and editors. I heard all about platforms and social media. I started a mama blog.

Though five agents want to see the memoir upon completion, the revision required to take the first draft to something that is actually a book requires more of me than I had when I pitched it a year ago, and more than I have now. On a good day, my son takes a nap. During that time, I sit at the computer and work on writing or the business of writing. I submit poems. I work on articles or essays. I write blog entries. I have event spent time indexing the memoir transcription so that when I have longer than one and a half hour blocks to work with, I will be ready to work on the book again.

So, here I am on another Monday, having a writing group with all the voices inside my head. I hope you will join us.