Writing Through the Years: A Fort Collins Retrospective

By Jenny Morse

Our Fort Collins Shut Up & Write! group at Stodgy Brewing

Our Fort Collins Shut Up & Write! group in Colorado was started in 2018 by Molly McCowan, Lead Word Nerd at Inkbot Editing. We met on Wednesday nights at a local coffeehouse and creative hub, Wolverine Farm, where we gathered around a long table surrounded by books. When I first stumbled across the group online, I was excited to connect with other writers. I had moved to Fort Collins to teach at Colorado State University and had ended up working in the business school, where I often felt like an outsider as a writer and poet. It's hard to find like-minded folks as an adult, but I found my people around that table on Wednesday nights! And many of them became good friends.

When the pandemic hit, our community moved online, like everyone else. We still met, but it wasn't quite the same as being together in-person. As the world eventually began to open back up, we started having get-togethers in each other's backyards. At our first one, we sat six feet apart, everyone yelling across the yard as we talked about our projects, ate good food, shared drinks, and enjoyed being together again. It was awkward and hilarious, but we appreciated the chance to reconnect.

By 2021, as the world was returning to normal, I was eager to get our writing sessions back together in-person. We still had a few online sessions running, but it was time to start meeting in-person again. During the pandemic, a brewery had opened in an old fireplace shop near my house, Stodgy Brewing, and I was eager to have more excuses to hang out there.

When I reached out to the owner about using their side room to host a Shut Up & Write! session, she was skeptical at first. "Let's schedule it for a few weeks and see how it goes," she said. Three years later, we finally earned a listing on their website. By then, we had become a Tuesday night institution at the brewery!

Our Tuesday night meetup has a strong core of regulars and a rotating group of visitors. Once, a couple showed up totally unprepared because they were playing a game of attending random events to see what would happen! Recently, we've had a few people join who have found us on the Stodgy website. The little room we use can be a tight fit, and we often overflow into the rest of the bar and onto the gorgeous patio when the weather is warm. Throughout the winter, we are accompanied by a group of fiddlers who play and practice at the brewery every other week.

In 2024, I planned our first Pub Crawl. It was an idea I had read about from a San Francisco crew a few years before and I'd been dying to do it since Fort Collins is the town of bikes and breweries. That summer, about fifteen people rode bikes from one place to another, sharing community and adventure, while getting in about five hours of focused writing! We've done three Pub Crawls since then, all visiting different places around town. We even did one in the middle of a snowstorm, walking together from place to place!

This past holiday season, we did a White Elephant book exchange for the third time with our Stodgy crew. Molly had done a few of those with our original group, and we had so much fun sharing the books we loved with each other.

As people in a university town, we have several professors as core members, including Professor Brian and Physics Brian. We actually have four Brians and four Lauras among our regulars! People connected to the university come to work on homework, school writing projects, academic papers, research, and book projects. But we have our fair share of novelists, too, with lots of horror, fantasy, and romance writers working on everything from their first books to their twenty-third books!

The Tuesday Stodgy group has been active for nearly five years and the wider Shut Up & Write! Fort Collins group has proliferated so that there is an event running nearly every day. Charlie runs a group on Sunday mornings that has been overflowing its space on the second floor of a local coffee shop. On Mondays, Bonnie runs an online group and Heather runs a group that has now passed on to a new host. Joey started groups on Wednesday and Friday evenings, which now have new hosts, and he has started another event at the university library. Val has a great community at the Thursday night event in Loveland, with a wonderful group of regulars who host soup nights and made a chapbook out of their writing this year.

Today, our Fort Collins writing community is active and thriving nearly every day of the week! As people who have been part of this community relocate or travel, they find other Shut Up & Write! groups and carry that sense of community with them. All of us writers are so grateful for the Shut Up & Write! community and the structure that encourages us to meet fellow writers and actually get our work done!

If you have a Shut Up & Write! journey you're excited to share, email our team at questions@shutupwrite.com or use the #shutupandwrite hashtag on social media.