The Importance of a Creative Writing Cohort

Irene Cooper

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Etymologically, the word cohort is a bit at odds with itself, linked to both war (Roman infantry) and peace (farmyard or garden). As creative writers, we’re typically pretty comfortable with tension and juxtaposition. There is energy in difference.

One of the core tenets in The Forge is community. Community—check out all those m’s. We dip briefly into the emotional impact of linguistics in the early weeks of The Forge program, wherein we learn that the pronounced ‘m’ is a voiced bilabial nasal, a sound that can evoke calm, imply intimacy, or express sympathy. Think: yummy; think: Om. It’s a great word, community, but does not perhaps get directly at the concept of cohort. Both words share a sense of commonality, of purpose; community and cohort are not at odds, of course, but cohort carries, I think, a whiff of competition. It gives edge.

Competition is not a word I love, to be honest—too susceptible to narrow binaries of win and lose, and too often an instigator of zero-sum thinking in art. Alone with our keyboards and the internet, writers can begin to believe that there are only so many slots for success, that one writer’s success means another’s failure. But creative writing is not a lottery.

It is not that luck—or timing, or some other serendipity— has no bearing on your writing success. I’d like to propose, however, that good fortune favors the writers who have prepared for success in concrete ways—practicing the art, reading reading reading, and yes, building a cohort of creatives with whom they can take the journey, fellow writers and artists who share a common vocabulary and support one another’s goals.  

Famous Cohorts

The Algonquin Round Table. Members: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, and others. Genres: playwriting, journalism, poetry, criticism, fiction, composing, illustration, performance.

The Bloomsbury Group. Members: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and others. Genres: fiction, essays, economics, art, criticism, poetry, philosophy, publishing.

Stratford-on-Odeon, or the Shakespeare & Co. group on Rue de l’Odéon, Paris. Members: Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, others.

The Inklings included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

The Harlem Renaissance included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and many others.

South-Side Writers Group included Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker.

Also: the Beats; the Black Mountain College…the list goes on.

Find Your Creative Writing People

These literary and artistic cohorts read and listened to each other’s work and nourished each other’s art and careers. Many of the more famous cohorts pushed art and literature outside of their own circles and into the mainstream and collective consciousness. Did these artists all write the same things in the same way? Absolutely not, and that’s a key to their achievements, both individual and collective.

(Did many if not all of these groups bring the drama re: drinking, drugging, and assorted mayhem? Sure. Are we still reading and enjoying and talking about the work? Yes, yes we are. Was the mayhem instrinisc to the art? I can't speak for other artists, but in my view, art does not require self-annihilation, quite the reverse—another blog for another time...)

As the Romans might have said, ex unitate vires: in unity, strength. Find new strength in a writing cohort that cares about your work.

Ready to light a fire under your creative writing? Get in touch for a chat to see if The Forge 10-Month Online Creative Writing Program is for you. New cohort convenes in September 2026.

Happening Now: the power of the present tense

by Ellen Santasiero

July 2026

Photo by Vanja Lazic

I’ve been thinking about the present tense lately because I just finished reading Amy Lin’s Here, After, a grief memoir written in a series of present-tense vignettes. The book offers a way for certain memoirists to make a manuscript more of a page turner. “Certain memoirists?” you ask. “Which ones?”

The ones who do not live a celebrity life, and the ones who do not have a cataclysmic external event to recount—a skirmish with a polar bear, say—that will help propel the tale along. (Wait! I have to see how the hell she's going to get her head out of the bear’s mouth.)

Ordinary people writing stories of inner (and therefore abstract) journeys worry about how to keep readers interested. Poets who write such stories have a leg up, for as practitioners of the supreme art (in my opinion), they can use language to beguile readers from chapter to chapter.

Thankfully, for the rest of us, there are a few craft tools at our disposal, that, when used judiciously, can make our stories crackle. One of those is the present tense, a choice that Lin makes, which in turn makes her book hard to put down.

If I write, “I eat a peach,” I signal to the reader’s brain that said peach-eating is happening right now (as opposed to “I ate a peach.”) And the brain thinks that whatever is happening right now is important. The reader watches more keenly for what happens next.

In Lin’s memoir, the use of present tense helps the reader register the shock and suddenness that Lin feels when her husband dies (it’s happening now!) and, Lin says, it also reflects another, more nuanced aspect of her experience.

“The thing about grief,” said Lin, “for me, certainly, was that when I entered into it, I fell out of time. Which is to say, the ways in which we tend to quantify established time—past, present, future—completely eroded for me. … That’s what grief does, it completely deflates these realms.”

Of the present tense, Peter Selgin, the author of Your First Page, writes, “For a sense of immediacy, nothing beats it. Screenplays traditionally avail themselves of it. It is the most cinematic of tenses.”

The present tense is much maligned in some quarters for being banal at worst, and limiting at best. Selgin claims it restricts the writer’s movement between the past and present, and allows little, if any, space for reflection. OK, I say, but a writer may want the limitations inherent in this tense. The thing to know is what you want in a piece of writing and to use any or all tools to achieve it.

It turns out that Lin’s use of the present tense did not limit her in the ways Selgin laid out. She moves seamlessly from her present-day grieving to present-tense flashbacks of courtship and married life. It only takes a signal phrase at the beginning of each flashback to orient us in time:

“On our second date, he spends an hour making elaborate grilled cheese sandwiches …” and, “During our honeymoon in Japan, I climb the stairs of our ryokan …”

As for reflections, the use of present tense did not preclude them:

“I am not going to do any of those things. It is not just because he is dead. I have never been the kind of person that can jump for joy—I want to but I am always too afraid. I need him to feel it for me. Jump for me.”

And, “Understand: I have never known how to love something in moderation.”

Of course, it is not the choice of present tense alone that makes Here, After so effective and affecting. All literary techniques swirl in concert with and in the context of other craft choices, in an alchemical medium where each multiplies the others’ effects. Lin’s sense of urgency, disorientation, and dislocation also come from her precise language and images, detailed scenes, and well-considered line, section, and chapter breaks.

If energy is low in one of your passages, try rewriting a past-tense scene in present tense. What does that do to your reading experience? Better yet, join us this fall at The Forge, where we help students experiment with all craft techniques till they find the best ways to tell their own stories.

We’re accepting applications now for our 2026 class. Email us at theforgewriting@gmail.com

The Benefits of Sharing

by Mike Cooper | June 2026

When we talk about sharing our work with the world, we often think in terms of publishing. Another way to share, albeit potentially more frightening, is reading our work in public.

There are enormous benefits to reading or speaking your work to a live audience. I tell all my students that your absolute best editing tool is to read your work out loud. We write as our heart beats and our breath rises and falls. When you read aloud, you’ll hear the phrasing, the rhythm, the pacing, and the musicality of your writing. You’ll hear where your heartbeat races and where you become breathless.

And whereas published work goes out into the nameless, faceless void, a live reading offers instant feedback, like a conversation. You’ll hear people laugh and gasp and cry (occasionally at the parts where you hadn’t intended it). You’ll see if people are smiling or looking at their watch or their phone or have their head down on the table. You’ll know where you nailed it and where you need to do a bit more work. And mostly, you’ll take that solitary act that you labored over and bring it into the light of community.

“But, Mike,” you say, “public speaking is terrifying.”

Depending on who did the survey, our top five fears are: spiders, snakes, flying, heights, and public speaking. Fear of death is usually a bit further down the list, though it seems that at least three out of four of the above have the fear of death in common: spider or snakebites could kill you, and it’s not so much that we fear flying or heights, but the potential of falling.

But how many deaths have been attributed to speaking in public? We could maybe say that Socrates died as the result of public speaking, or Joan of Arc, and President William Harrison reportedly died from pneumonia soon after a two-hour outdoor winter speech he gave without hat or coat. But it’s not high up on the list of “causes of death.”

So what are we afraid of? I think mostly we are afraid of rejection and judgement. It is important to us that we blend in with our peers. We are a species that relies on each other for survival, and we don’t want to lose our credibility or tarnish our image. We may actually experience physical symptoms when faced with a public speaking situation (anxiety, dry mouth, sweats, nausea,).

So how do we overcome and persevere? I think that we need to shift our mindset. One: consider that what you’re sharing is of benefit to your audience—as much as the writing and editing and polishing was to you. You are sharing your insights into the Human Condition, and others may be able to see the world in a broader, more understanding light. Two: bear in mind that—and this is very important!—that your work is not you. It is a piece of art, no more, and no less. And three: consider those physical symptoms as a result of excitement and anticipation rather than fear—like waiting in line for the roller coaster.

So give it a try. Go to a public reading, an open mic, a poetry slam, even an online sharing (like the Blank Pages Salon) and give your voice some wings. It gets better and better, and it’s a fantastic tool to help your writing. Writing is just speaking on the page, after all.

And please join us on Saturday, June 6 at 3PM for the 4^th Annual Forge Smithys Reading at the New Central Library (61956 SE Santorini St. in Bend) or online at this ZOOM LINK. You’ll hear some amazing work!

Applications for the 2026-27 class are open now: The Forge.