“Building Writing Communities” at UCLA Writing Programs’ Creating Connections Symposium

On Friday, May 17, 2019, Writing Programs at UCLA held its second annual Creating Connections symposium on writing pedagogy. The event brings together UCLA faculty and graduate students to discuss teaching methods for writing instruction. It is organized by students in the Graduate Certificate in Writing Pedagogy in consultation with faculty and staff in UCLA Writing Programs.

As part of the symposium, I moderated a panel on the subject of “Building Writing Communities.” Muriel McClendon (UCLA History Department), Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (UCLA Writing Programs), and Reed Wilson (UCLA English Department and Writing Programs) shared their experiences with writing communities, ones that they have created and been a part of, speaking to the value that writing communities have for writers, students, and instructors. We discussed what makes a group of writers successful and how to build that sense of community that fosters creativity and productivity among our student writers and among our writing peers.

I offered the Transcendentalists as an example of a successful writing community. Their intellectual and cultural legacy—which includes the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, and those of many other, lesser-known writers—is a testament to how effective writing communities can be.

They are sometimes thought of as a group of self-reliant individualists who valued solitude over society, but the Transcendentalists were actually quite the opposite. They were a social group who supported each other’s writing in all possible ways. The “Transcendental Club” first came together in 1836 to discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson’s new book, Nature, and continued meeting in and around Boston on a regular basis for the next several years: conversing, discussing books, sharing their journals, writing each other letters and sharing letters, editing each other’s work, and publishing pamphlets, books, and a literary journal of their own. When the original group stopped meeting, Margaret Fuller started a series of “Conversations” which widened the circle of the movement to include more women and kept the movement going through the early 1840s. It is probably no accident that when the Transcendentalists ceased to function as an active writing community, their movement wound down as well but not without leaving its mark on the literary world.