An Hour a Day to Keep the Censor Away? A Gift of the London Writers’ Salon

By Angela Bonavoglia 

More than a year ago, I found myself, a professional writer, stuck. 

I’d been stuck before. Definitely after my first book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, foreword by Gloria Steinem. Random House sent me all over the country to talk about the book, especially about the harrowing experiences with pre-Roe illegal abortions that people I interviewed like Whoopi Goldberg and Rita Moreno had. It was a heady time, but when it was over, I crashed. 

I didn’t get stuck after my second book, which came out 10 years later, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. I still had more to say about the Church. I had occasionally gotten stuck at other times on other particularly demanding projects, but it had been a long time since I felt stuck like this.

I had just finished a blitz for my memoir, Hot Nights on Times Square: How Feminism Changed America and Me. I’d been told I needed to pitch it to at least 100 potential agents. My agent had retired, so I began mining my contacts as well as compiling a cold list using Query Tracker. I started sending my proposal out—and out. What a demoralizing process. I balanced it by creating, with my husband, an absurdist newsletter called ODD (Our Domicile Daily, published weekly), to deliver “all the fun of pandemic life in one easy read.” It kept me writing for a small, appreciative audience. 

But as the pandemic wound down, we ended our newsletter. I still had no agent, publisher or idea what to do next. I’d write something new or edit something old, but then let the work languish, defeated by the censor in my head. I always had to fight that censor, that relentless voice that says: “You’re not good enough! Your work is awful! You have nothing to say!” It was louder than ever. 

I needed quiet. I needed it to shut up. I needed to just write. 

Time passed. Then, a writer friend mentioned the Writers’ Hour to me. She sent me a link and one morning, in desperation, I clicked on. I had no idea what to expect. 

The Writers’ Hour is a free gift of the London Writers’ Salon. There are four Writers’ Hours every weekday—all commencing at 8 a.m. local time - from London, NY, LA and Melbourne, Australia. When you sign up, you get the start time in your own time zone. Every Writers’ Hour—delivered via Zoom—begins with a cacophony of voices greeting us from all over the world. Then very quickly, we are muted by the session’s leaders, two each day.  There is one ground rule: paraphrasing the writer Neil Gaiman, we’re told: “You can do absolutely nothing--or write.” They ask us to put into the chat what we’re working on, and the responses are all over the place. People are writing operas and plays, pitch decks and poems, blogs and vlogs, song lyrics and promotion plans for their books. Some write morning pages, a la Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way. “Words of Wisdom” comes next, an inspiring quote sent in by a participant. Then, we’re off, writing “alone, but together.” 

Since beginning the Writers’ Hour, I’ve come out of my rut. I wrote an essay to pitch to Chicken Soup for the Soul’s collection on miracles. I recounted the time I was heading, terrified, to an Operating Room for a breast biopsy, having prayed in advance for my dead father to hold my hand. “Holding Hands with a Ghost?” didn’t find a home in the collection, but it did at Welter, the University of Baltimore’s online journal (discovered through my search for lesser known outlets, but that’s another story). I wrote a little satire, “A Period Piece,” about a harried tycoon who settles into a bathroom stall, does his business, then is enraged to find that he has to drop a quarter, exactly a quarter, into a slot to get any toilet paper. I reviewed my memoir proposal and sent it out to a few more places. 

Sometimes now, when I should be writing, I spend a little time thinking, looking around me, seeing what calls me. That’s my prelude to finally writing again, but in fact, it’s what all of us do every day, writers and everyone else. We ponder, we watch the people around us, listen, witness, sometimes with curiosity, too often today with scorn and rage, but sometimes, in the good times, with amusement, fascination, and love. 

When I’m in one of those moods during Writers’ Hour, I sneak peeks—though my camera is off—at my cohorts. People lean weary heads on open hands, fiddle with their hair, bite a lip, yawn, furrow a brow, adjust a monitor, drink something, talk to their computers. One guy is looking down, obviously reading, madly turning his head back and forth—which is what owls do when they’re mad. One woman’s black cat is draped over her shoulders. 

The hour ends with the hosts coming back in, soft music playing in the background. They tell us that 50 minutes (minus five for intros, five for the closing) of uninterrupted writing time is over. Everyone lucky enough to be “in the flow” is invited to flow on out. As for the rest of us, we’re asked to share our experience in the chat. Often, people say what I’m thinking, like “wrote garbage, but that’s okay,” or someone editing what they’ve been working on for years, saying (apropos of my memoir) “I’m so sick of reading my old writing.” And always, always, people write, “thank you.” 

Quickly, the number of participants falls off a cliff, until we all vanish, into the ether. 

The Writers’ Hour provides a kind of kindling for my work, a path of embers that can start to blaze at any time. That simple hour has made for me a quiet and safe place; no censor allowed. What I write doesn’t even matter, only that I write. And, while writing requires solitude, there is real grace in being reminded that I am not alone. 

Taking advantage of that opportunity for uber connection is what the people who created the Writers’ Hour intended. The London Writers’ Salon founders, Parul Bavishi and Matt Trinetti, believe that “writing, especially when done in community, can help us build more meaningful lives, and create a happier, more connected world.” 

That’s very ethereal. I’m especially attuned to the shadow side of this writing life. Plus, I have a dark sense of humor. Regarding those quotes people send in for “Words of Wisdom,” I’ve thought about sending in a quote that I love, but then reconsidered. It comes from humorist extraordinaire, Dorothy Parker. She said: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” 

Thankfully, despite her many struggles, Parker wrote madly, wickedly, until the very end. 

As the years fly by, today, that is my goal too. 

Angela Bonavoglia’s features, investigative reports, essays, and profiles have been published in many venues, including Ms. (former contributing editor), the NY Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon, Women’s Media Center and HuffPost. She is the author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, and The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion (oral history, foreword by Gloria Steinem). Her work has appeared in many collections, including 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution. Visit her at www.angelabonavoglia.com