The Grotto

by Po Bronson

Julia asked me, “Can writing schools really teach you to write?” I never thought that was the litmus test. Writing school helped me by surrounding me with people who aspired to the same ideals I did. I’d been a bond salesman—I didn’t know any other writers, and I’d never even met a writer. I didn’t even know any readers. If the other traders and salespeople read books, they never mentioned it. At school, for at least one night a week, I sat down beside people who thought nothing was more important than making a sentence sing. Who believed that having a story accepted by a small journal with a readership of a 1,000 librarians was just about the most prestigious accomplishment imaginable. Who had chosen, like me, to compromise their love lives and work lives to carve out time for being alone with their thoughts and a pencil. Who had received rejection letter after rejection letter, and who had been called “impractical” by their parents. I can’t emphasize enough the sway of being in a community of like-minded people. As New Orleans had its effect on Marc and Julia, my writing school helped support the choice I’d made. Because the hardest thing was not learning to write; the hardest thing was to never give up.

The publication of my first novel was my great chance to quit working and attempt to support myself by writing full-time. I imagined I might maintain an income writing for magazines. But I was going to finish my graduate degree around the same time. I would take the leap without my community, my 3-hour-a-week lifeline that had nourished me for seven years. What would I do all day? Who would I talk to? I was accustomed to waking up every morning and going to the office.

So with two other writer friends—Ethan Canin (who I’d met playing pick-up basketball) and Ethan Watters (who knew editors at magazines)—we rented a second-floor flat in a dusty Victorian on Market Street in a no-man’s land between the Castro and City Hall. This would be a place where we wrote every day. It had six rooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen. The rent was intimidating, and we were on the hook for the whole nugget if we couldn’t find some creative types to occupy the other three rooms. So we threw a party. We made up a postcard invitation, but the address, 2148 Market Street, looked too lonely floating in the middle of the card. Who wanted to come to “2148 Market Street”? What was it?

A restaurant? A bar?

“We need an enticing name,” one of the Ethans said.

“What about ‘The Grotto’?” said the other.

“You can’t steal Jim’s name!” I protested.

Jim was another writer who rented the basement room in my house as his writing space. He called it The Grotto.

“Jim’s on vacation. He’ll never know.”

“But I’ll know!” I fought back.

“What about ‘The Writers’ Grotto’?”

“That’s the same thing!”

“Not quite the same.”

So we stole Jim’s name, and everyone we knew came to the party, curious about what the Writers’ Grotto was. They came, they got drunk, they danced, they lit off fireworks, set a tree on fire, climbed up to the roof, broke the toilet, ruined the carpet, and left, still unsure what the Writers’ Grotto was.

“Do you live here?”

“No. Just work.”

“Are you all writing a book together?”

“No. Just our own projects.”

“How much does rent cost?”

“Two to three hundred.”

“A month!?”

“Yeah.”

“You can fly to Cabo every month for that!”

“I like to write.”

“But you can write at home, for free.”

We were going to get stuck with the whole rent. It was hard for people to understand what we were doing. There was nothing like it in the whole city. There were writing colonies, where people go and live and write for a month or two. There were writing conferences, where people take classes for a week. The rest of the time, writers cling to their outsider status, which they resent and defend at the same time, feeling it is somehow crucial to their sense of being special. At the conferences and colonies, writers notoriously got drunk and had affairs, so everyone suspected that was what the Grotto was really about—we had our clubhouse, the boys with the treehouse fort, a place to get drunk at two in the afternoon and screw women and never grow up. It took years before people stopped assuming the worst about the Grotto whenever they heard about it. Luckily, the three rooms were finally taken, by a filmmaker (David), a monologist (Josh), and a struggling freelancer (Tessa) who had written a couple pieces for a British daily. She was the only woman at the original Grotto. She became our den mother. She made tea for us in the afternoons and listened to stories about our love lives, which were smalltime dramas compared to the ones she’d lived through. The beauty of the Grotto is, when I have a bad day, at least I went to the office. A bad day working at home is a sad and lonely thing, and if a few bad days land in a row then an editing job starts to sound pretty appealing.

Our daily life was structured by the routine of work. I didn’t want to become a writer so I could escape from work, to not work, or to get rich on royalties so I’d never have to work. I wanted to work. I craved work, as much as a sled dog or a pack horse, work that fulfilled me. We got up, had coffee at home, read the paper, drove to the Grotto, and then just let the benefit of being around each other rub off. I learned how to write features from Ethan Watters, I learned screenwriting from David, and I learned to speak extemporaneously in public from Josh. Nobody taught me these things; they were doing it, and made it seem possible. We created an environment where taking creative risks was O.K. Nothing was formalized—the sharing and reading of each other’s work was entirely spontaneous....