Craft and Career Growth
‍Members generously share their experience and guidance to foster craft and career growth in a community setting.
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• Tap into the community in an active email Listserv & Slack
• Seek and offer guidance on writerly topics
• Share new writing opportunities and calls for submissions
• Celebrate wins and share challenges
• Learn about events, readings, and timely information of interest to writers
• Network with fellow professionals for career advice and opportunities
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Participate in monthly virtual/hybrid groups on various topics. Current groups include:
• Poetry
• Nonfiction/Memoir/Essay
• Journalism
• Novel Writing
• Short Fiction
• Publicity/Marketing
• Book Club
• Bullet Journaling

Access co-working desks in a spacious centrally located San Francisco office, with private and shared offices available to rent exclusively for members
• Weekly group lunches
• Informal gatherings on and offsite to connect with other members

Publicity and Community Engagement
‍The Writers Grotto promotes members’ work and events, facilitating their participation in the wider literary community.
• Opportunity to read at monthly Reading & Meeting events
• List your publications, events, and awards in the monthly GrottoLetter
• Amplify your events and publications on our social media channels
• Gather community support for book launches and events
• Participate in GrottoPod podcast in 2024
• List your latest works on our Selected Works page
• Add your writing services to our website

Teaching and Mentorship
‍Members teach classes at the Writers Grotto to earn money and gain teaching experience.
• Teach classes & workshops
• Facilitate our weekly Write-Ins
• Offer writing coaching services
• Participate as a keynote or faculty member for the annual Rooted & Written Conference, a conference taught by and attended by people of color, to mentor and teach emerging writers

Pricing
• The annual membership fee is $602, but the Grotto uses a sliding scale that starts at $300 for writers in need
• Black and Latinx writers with financial constraints are eligible to apply to the Flower & Song (Flor Y Canto) Fund. Please see below for further details
• Private or shared office spaces are availabel for an additional fee

Flower & Song (Flor Y Canto) Fund
‍The Flower & Song / Flor Y Canto Fund is a need-based fund open to Black and Latinx writers. If you would like to apply for partial financial assistance toward the Writers Grotto membership fees, please send an email to florycanto(at)writersgrotto.org to request a link to the membership and fund application.

A few things to note:

• We’re looking for professional-level creators of quality narrative—memoirists, journalists, novelists, poets, screenwriters, playwrights, comedians, storytellers and more. Our members are narrative artists of a variety of disciplines. Though we may pay the bills with commercial side projects, our primary work is not generally advertising, marketing, press relations or related corporate content. Publication history counts, but quality of work trumps quantity. We prefer to see a book or an equivalent body of work, but those with excellent writing samples and only a small number of credits, combined with demonstrated commitment to professionalism and full-time devotion to their craft, may also become members.

• Diversity is a strong factor when considering applicants; the Grotto strives to be a community that is diverse along many dimensions—not just gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or age, but creative medium, physical ability, experience and many other things.

• We are also a community of people who take part—who regularly spend time at the Grotto, get excited about being around other narrative artists, participate in and attend each other’s readings and events, and even start new initiatives—and who want to contribute to helping sustain a diverse, creative and supportive community of writers and storytellers of many different kinds. We attend to new applications as quickly as we can, but we’re a tiny organization and so the process sometimes moves more slowly than we’d like. If you don’t hear from us within a month after you apply, it just means we are swamped and haven’t gotten to you yet—we will soon. Feel free to reach out with an inquiry. Applicants who are not selected for membership are free to resubmit with updated credentials, but we ask that you do so no more than once a year.

Questions? Contact us at membership(at)writersgrotto.org.

Applications for the general public will reopen in spring 2024.