Meet the Blunt Quills

As far as my fiction writing career is concerned, my biggest accomplishment to date is my membership in the Blunt Quills.

“Your membership in the what?”

I know. I’ll come back to how we got our name in a second, but first, the origin story.

In 2020, I took a writing course online. For two months, every Saturday, we Zoomed-in to learn, write, and share. The professor, a published author herself, Divya Sood, in addition to teaching a lifetime of valuable literary lessons, encouraged us to surround ourselves with other writers, find a support system, stay in the writing world, anything to treat it like a job, and not a hobby.

I wanted to keep meeting with the like-minded individuals I’d just met, but after some time in quarantine, “Oh no, put myself out there and risk rejection from strangers!” Ugh! The thought gave me nervous stomach.

Luckily, the outgoing, salesman of the group, Chris, emailed the class and said, “who wants to be in a writing group? We’ll meet same time, each Saturday, on Zoom.”

Several people responded, a few showed up, five of us remained. We’re scattered across the world, and for almost two years now, we’ve written stories together, edited copy, and shared our triumphs and rejections, as we embark on our individual literary adventures.

In 2021, we added a new member, gave ourselves a website, and a name: The Blunt Quills.

It’s taken from Henry David Thoreau’s journal, February 14, 1840.

“Beauty lives by rhymes. Double a deformity is a beauty. Draw this blunt quill over the paper, and fold it once transversely to the line, pressing it suddenly before the ink dries, and a delicately shaded and regular figure is the result, which art cannot surpass.”

Why this phrase from this piece?

Because even from the mundane beauty can be made. As writers, we are critical of ourselves and reluctant to share. Stories we tell ourselves are dull, are read by others and found to be extraordinary - so we remind ourselves to be like Henry David Thoreau - who wrote every day about what he loved. He didn’t sit down to write the greatest American novel, to get rich, or be famous. He did it because he loved nature, he lived to observe it, and desired to document it all in its ever-changing glory. As a result, he was one of the most prolific American writers of his time and the standard to which other nature-loving American writers hold themselves. (Or activists who look to Civil Disobedience.)

While the Blunt Quills are not writing about politics or our time in the woods, like Thoreau, we write because we love to.

Like Thoreau, we embrace and celebrate our differences as people and writers. We’re a diverse group of all ages, backgrounds, and races, and we all write in different genres: literary, non-fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and young adult.

Like Thoreau, we aspire to find beauty in the simple, new, and maintain a curiosity to the world around us, from which we draw inspiration. We toil away on books, short stories, and poems, which may never live outside our computers; however, as writers, they live loudly in our heads, and must find a way out, else drive us mad.

Head over to our website, which Ashley put together, and meet the rest of the Blunt Quills. The site itself is growing and will soon house joint writing projects, a list of published works, and other writing milestones.

https://www.thebluntquills.com/