In October 2025, I met JC Bybee and Grey Alder, writers extraordinaire, at the Bear Lake Writers Conference in Montpelier. We discovered that we were all living in fantastical worlds inside our heads, and we hit it off. We formed a writers group. It’s a transformative experience. JC and I have both finished full-length novels with the help and encouragement of the group, and Grey has created a thriving Substack of short stories.
As experienced writers and expert givers and receivers of feedback, things have gone astonishingly smoothly. We realized, however, that not everyone is as lucky as we are to find a healthy and positive writing group. We decided to start recording our critique sessions and publishing them as a podcast to be a resource for people to create or improve their own writing groups. It’s been a lot of fun, and if you are a writer (actually, a writer who is interested in writing groups, we have an incredibly small niche), I know you’d enjoy our thoroughly unscripted sessions with loads of tangents about everything from writing craft to our views on AI use. Enjoy.