2023 Fellow Craig Holt reflects on working with his BookEnds pod. 

I have always been impressed with the way the writing community supports its own. Whether it’s online or in flesh and blood, we recommend each other’s books to friends, review one another’s books, celebrate each other’s successes, and listen to each other lament the inevitable slowdowns and five-car collisions on the long and winding road to a finished draft. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent critiquing each other’s work. 

I’ve had the good fortune to participate in some excellent writers’ groups and I have exchanged plenty of pages with wonderful peers in my MFA program. I even have a coven of reliable beta readers in my life. I’m grateful to all of them. But as a novelist I always wished I could exchange entire books with other authors and take a deep dive into each other’s revisions over the course of months. I always assumed that such a dedicated gaggle of authors would be difficult to come by and impossible to sustain. How would you structure it? Who has the time? Where do you find peers generous enough to devote that much time to other people’s projects? 

The answer, for me, was BookEnds. 

BookEnds was – and continues to be – an exceptional learning experience anchored by an unprecedented level of mutual support between writers.

First of all, there is the question of scale. Instead of going over ten or twenty pages of one person’s work every few weeks or once a month, my amazing podmates Miranda Shulman, Fae Engstrom and I started by reading each other’s entire manuscripts. We spent our first three meetings talking through our initial impressions and learning what the author was trying to achieve with the book. Thereafter, we gathered every week on Zoom, often for three hours or more per session, to go over one podling’s book. 

We started by addressing big picture issues and then worked our collective way over the course of six months down to line edits. We weren’t obligated to meet every week, but all three of us had been encouraged to essentially run our novels through a woodchipper and reshape the splintery, resinous hash into a new draft. Having read each other’s manuscripts in their entirety, we were eager to see each other’s stories reborn. 

But there was more to it than just the quantity of feedback. There was also the quality. I was struck by the depth of insight Miranda and Fae brought to my work. They are experienced authors and careful readers, and they came to every session with a wealth of ideas, many of which surprised me. Their feedback came from a place of real understanding of my characters, and an enthusiasm for helping me create the story I had intended to write. They were relentlessly honest and unflaggingly encouraging. Miranda and Fae put as much into my story as they did their own, and it was a pleasure to do the same for them. 

Before the program began, I worried that spending so much time on other people’s books would wear me out. Instead, working on Miranda and Fae’s stories energized me. In thinking critically about their work I gained insight into my own story, and their remarkable progress inspired me to slog onward. 

Even after we began work with our mentors (for more on that happy topic, take a look at Daisy Alpert Florin’s excellent post on working with program director Susan Scarf Merrell, among many other posts on working with mentors) our group continued to meet regularly. We continued to go over pages, but we also touched base to talk through slowdowns in our plots or float ideas for alternate narrative routes. Sometimes we got together to listen as one or the other of us lamented being blindsided by self-doubt or just shook our tiny fists at the literary sky. We guided each other to our BookEnds destination, and beyond. 

Since completing the program last June, we’ve continued to meet. We’ve gone through another round of edits on each other’s books, and we share notes on the good and humbling process of querying. We remain invested in each other and in our fellow BookEnders. And as part of the active and encouraging BookEnds Alumni group, our support network continues to grow. There is sustenance there. Fuel for the long journey. So, yes, BookEnds helped me improve my book. Just as importantly, it expanded and strengthened my writing family.

People talk a lot about how solitary the writing life can be, but BookEnds showed me that being a part of the writing community is about more than craft. Investing in other writers and their work can make the process a little bit less painful and a lot more rewarding. 

Craig Holt’s work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He graduated from the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program and, more recently, from the BookEnds, where he worked with program co-founding director Meg Wolitzer.