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.