Writing is a famously lonely profession. Through our work with clients, the Gilliam Writers Group is committed to sharing the burden of writing, transforming the process from an intimidating solo endeavor into a generative, shared conversation. We also do that for our faculty—that is, for each other. Unlike other online writing tutoring and freelance writing coaching services, which largely fail to prioritize interaction between service providers, we actively support each other through mentoring, workshops, dinners, retreats, and more. In this way, GWG’s faculty comes to know and trust one another deeply, forging relationships that make the Gilliam Writers Group fundamentally different from our competitors. We believe these relationships are essential to providing the highest quality services for our clients and students.

When writers work as a collective, we can impact psychology and culture in lasting ways, forever changing how we and our readers see the world. In the nineteenth century in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a “brotherhood of the Like-Minded” began meeting regularly to discuss their views, which diverged in every way except their shared progressivism. Labeled the Transcendental Club by a disparaging critic, this band of writers, thinkers, and theologians would go on to publish its own groundbreaking literary journal, The Dial, and pen some of the most influential texts of the century, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”, to Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The Transcendentalist Club is just one example of the countless literary fellowships, from the Dark Tower salons of the Harlem Renaissance to the Friday Clubs of the Bloomsbury Group, in which writers working in English have found not only camaraderie, but influence, through mutual support and empathetic conversation.

For the authors of the Transcendental movement, teaching was just as important as writing; the classroom was an impactful and challenging proving ground for their philosophical theories. Bronson Alcott, for instance—father of Louisa May Alcott—was a radical experimenter in the field of pedagogy. He believed that learning occurred most effectively in organic conversation (as opposed to lecturing or rote memorization), and he refined this idea by putting it to work in his teaching practice. Today, more than 150 years after Bronson Alcott called for educators to follow the conversational or “dialogic” model, many in our field still believe that the best teaching occurs in open-ended, collaborative environments in which instructors can form authentic mentoring relationships, engage learners in demonstrations of received methodology, and respond in real-time to their own perceptions of student performance and cognition. As a collective of writing coaches, writing tutors, and manuscript editors working toward a shared educational goal—that of improving not only the work, but the minds, of our students and clients—we are better teachers, writers, and thinkers. We are better at what we do because we do it together.

From medieval universities to modern MFA workshops, history shows that writers produce their best work when they balance the solitary labor of authorship with communal sharing and attention. Because our faculty know one another, we can help each other grow as fellow writers and teachers across the many differences—differences of background, training, and intent—that might otherwise leave us siloed. As the humanities come under threat in the consumer model of the university, we reaffirm the transformational value of writing together, toward mutual advancement. The Gilliam Writers Group views itself as an alternative, supplementary space in which humanities learning and mentorship can find new ways to change us: a laboratory that exists to support, but also challenge, these processes as they occur in conventional academic and literary settings. Our faculty and clients are likewise, we hope, supported but never too comfortable, never stagnant, in their engagement with our ever-evolving work. Collaborating with GWG means extending your mind in two directions once: we deepen our roots in humanity’s archive as we train our minds toward the future of thought and culture. Together, we tend what the philosopher Ivan Illich called “the vineyard of the text”, finding new forms of sustenance in the written word we share.