TLDR: We’ve officially opened our subscriber chat here on Subtack! Scroll down to learn how to join in on the fun.

You know what’s great about building a community of women writers of all ages, genres, and experience levels? Well, so much. Today I’m specifically celebrating our varied knowledge, and all the wonderful things I’ve learned from y’all throughout the first year (and a half!) of our existence as Midwest Women Who Write. Take, for example, this whole Substack thing: I’m still figuring it all out. When to post, what to post about, how to build a space that’s a truly good resource and space to connect. Enter Alex Ethridge (Fun & Games with Alex) who suggested we open up our subscriber chat as another way for us to connect. So, here we are, announcing a brand new addition to our Substack universe: Retreat & Repeat subscriber chat. Thank you, Alex!

From Substack: This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. We’ll post questions and updates that come our way, and you can jump into the discussion.

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How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for our chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into our thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

On Saturday I (Jess) wrote a letter to the mouse who died in my bag of plastic cutlery. Yes, it was based on a true story of something that happened that very morning, and no I will not share the details here, because it is lunchtime and you do not want to know them.

Why did I do this? Because Jill Orr told me to. OK, not specifically. The words were inspired by a prompt Jill, our speaker, presented at the Spring Retreat: write a letter to someone who’s unlikely to respond.

The mouse. Very unlikely to respond. We heard a variety of writings in response to several different (and very fun) prompts: a monologue from an eldest child, a letter to the financier of a denied home loan, to the hormones that wake us up at 3 a.m., among others.

I don’t think about being funny very often, especially not in my writing. I am, on a good day, as funny as my five year old’s jokes about the zoo animals getting stuck in a giraffic jam. (This one is pretty good.) When I think of funny writers, I think about people who are much much wittier than I on the page and in person. I had been eager to dive into this topic with Jill since we first began our speaker wish list. (This is one of the things I love most about each one of our retreats: I get to quietly fangirl. Each of our speakers have been someone I admire, and whose work has in some way made my own work better.)

Jill reminded all of us: you don’t have to be a funny person to be a funny writer.

Really? Really. A piece of her advice: “Don’t aim to make your reader laugh out loud; aim to turn a corner of their lip up into a smile.”

So how do we do this? A few notes: Latch on to your own voice. Use specificity, your own perspective of something that you know a lot about, or have experienced, and write about it in a way that adds a bit (even the tiniest bit) of humor to the page. There was more, of course, and it was fun and inspiring and yes, laugh out loud funny.

To get a taste, here’s an excerpt from community member Alex Ethridge, who wrote to her unread books.

To all the unread books on my shelves

By Alex Ethridge

I see you, stacked in ever-more-perilous columns on the glass IKEA shelves that flank my TV. I promise I will get to all of you at some point.

Some of you have been up there for years, and the parts of your gorgeous covers that are exposed to the afternoon sun that streams through my big window are fading — I’m so sorry, I really am! But I have to keep you in the living room, because every day I see your spines stare me down, as if to say “I’m still here! You were SO excited to purchase me three years ago in that trendy-ass bookstore you visited on a girls’ trip, so you should pick me up soon!” I also have to keep you in the living room so that when friends come over and look at my shelves they are impressed by how bookish I am and how eclectic and wise (pretentious) my tastes are. Obviously.

You’ve all patiently waited your turn as you saw me curl up with thinner, less literary counterparts on my couch. A stupid thriller that everyone was talking about that I couldn’t resist borrowing from the library. A too saccharine-sweet book about middle age I begrudgingly read for book club so that I could contribute to the conversation.

Stoner by John Williams — when I read about you, that you’re a cult classic that was never appreciated in its time, written by a professor at Mizzou and SET at Mizzou — about rural life and following your writerly passions and contemplating what it means to truly live — I knew I had to have you for my shelves and that I’d love you…later. How many times have I picked you up and lovingly stroked your cover just knowing that you’d make my literary dreams come true and yet picked something else as my next read!? It’s not you, it’s me.

Read the full text on Fun & Games with Alex (on Substack)

Feeling inspired to write your own humor piece? Here are a few prompts Jill shared with us.

Writing Break Prompt: Try one of McSweeney’s humor essay formats (Example titles are real essays on McSweeney’s site.) Aim for between 300 and 500 words.

1. Write an open letter to a person or entity who is unlikely to respond. (Example titles: Open Letter to the Soft Millennial Man Who is Now Facing Extinction / Open Letter to the New York Times Connections Editor / Open Letter to People Who Hate the Paul McCartney song, “Wonderful Christmastime.”)

2. Write a short, imagined monologue. (Example titles: Miranda Priestly Roasts My Nirvana T-shirt/ The Little Bunny From Goodnight Moon Accepts an Award / I am a Baby Staring at You from Between Two Airplane Seats and I know When You Are Going to Die.)

3. Write a List: (New Protein Menus / Anxieties Gifted to Me by My Three-Year-Old / Party Games for Fifty-somethings)

Want to get it published? Check out these Jill Orr recommended outlets!

Online publications to submit humor pieces:

§ Shouts & Murmurs in The New Yorker

§ McSweeny’s Internet Tendency

§ Points in Case

§ Defenestration

§ The American Bystander

§ The Belladonna (only open to submissions from women, non-binary, and genderqueer authors).

Announcements

• We debuted a little gift of hand-stamped journals for our attendees during our Spring Retreat, and it made my Midwestern heart so happy to see all of them written in and read from. Special thanks to our community member Abbey Gorsage, for crafting our new logo! Abbey is a high school art teacher, mom, writer, poet, artist and wonderfully creative thinker (among many other things!) She’s near the end of a 100 creative challenge and participated in a poem-a-thon in April—you can enjoy her work on Instagram.

Get a better look on our website, where you can find more info about our origin story, upcoming retreats, and more.

• Our next retreat is happening Saturday, September 19th. Speaker and location TBA. Thanks to Serendipity Salon & Gallery for hosting our Spring Retreat, and to Abby Does Charcuterie for catering lunch.

• There are lots of other fun things going on in the literary Midwest between now and then, like the Around the Campfire Online Reading Series, an initiative of Missouri Poet Laureate Justin Hamm. Each month, he’ll host a virtual reading and open mic, pairing a Missouri poet with one from elsewhere. Quarterly, we’ll gather in person at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia.
  
  Register for the Zoom link below:
  https://forms.gle/sdYcTQxVxJZouaDw5

• The New Territory magazine is nominated for two James Beard Media Awards, has an essay from MW Board member Candace Hulsizer in Issue 19, and is celebrating 10 years of publication this year!

  Our co-founder Jessica Vaughn Martin (hi, it’s me!) and our inaugural speaker Tina Casagrand Foss got some exciting news in early May when the James Beard Media Award was announced. Annie Fisher’s Ghost (which y’all heard me read from in November) is nominated in the Foodways category, and Passing on the Nog Off is nominated in the Beverages category. Both stories appeared in Issue 18, which you can grab with a lil’ discount using the code JAMESBEARD26.

  AND, Candace has a fantastic essay coming out in Issue 19 of The New Territory, which will be celebrated in Lebanon, Mo, on July 3rd. The magazine is celebrating 10 years of publication this year, so come out and join the party!

• We are searching for an advisory board member! We hope to find a woman in finance, fundraising, or something adjacent to this area of expertise. Do you have anyone in mind? Let us know!

• Know anyone who wants to help us grow? They can become a sponsor, and help us set the table for Midwestern women writers to hone their craft and grow in community.

• And just for fun: Don’t wait until the next retreat to use your new journal. Do something like this: 10 unusual ways to use your collection of empty journals. (If you have ever noticed my large collection of kraft paper notebooks that tag along with me, you’ll understand why this piece spoke to me.)

Do you have an announcement you’d like to share? Please let us know! Send a note to mwwomenwhowrite@gmail.com

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Hello, writers! Spring is here, and we’re delighting in the early redbud blooms, birdsong, and the front porch writing time it brings. And, a new season means a new retreat! We’re excited to announce our upcoming Spring Retreat, happening Saturday, May 16th at Serendipity Salon & Gallery in Columbia. Registration is open, and as a fun little bonus: the first 15 to register get a free copy of HOW NOT TO BE OLD (EVEN IF YOU ARE). Wait, who wrote this book? That’s our speaker, Jill Orr! Let’s meet her!

Meet Our Speaker: Jill Orr

Jill Orr is the author of HOW NOT TO BE OLD (EVEN IF YOU ARE), a PEOPLE.com Editor’s Pick, which hit #1 on the Amazon Bestseller list in the categories of Internet & Social Media humor, Aging Parents, and Cultural, Ethnic & Regional humor in its first week after publication. She also writes the Riley Ellison mystery series, which has been called “delightfully comic” and “highly amusing” by Publishers Weekly. Orr’s work has garnered praise from industry professionals and readers alike and her books have earned a Silver Falchion nomination, a starred review and “Best Book of the Week” from Booklist, and a Midwest Connections pick.

A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Jill lives in Columbia, Missouri.

Jill will lead us in conversation about using humor writing, and sharing techniques to make any story kind of a funny story.

We’re looking forward to writing and laughing together in May.

Hello, writers. You might have noticed some changes around here. Missouri Women Who Write is now Midwest Women Who Write! We’re very excited about this for lots of reasons, but mostly because it feels a bit like a dream come true.

What began as a series of seasonal writing retreats has grown into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Midwest Women Who Write. We’ve changed our name to welcome in regional writers beyond the borders of Missouri who over the past year have asked, “I’m from Kansas…can I still come?” Our answer then and now is yes, of course! Our mission hasn’t changed, but is now official: to set the table for Midwestern women writers of all ages, genres, and experience levels to hone their craft and cultivate a rooted community through a shared love of storytelling. We’re doing this with the thoughtful guidance of our Board of Directors, who together form a collection of diverse perspectives and industry backgrounds. Meet them here!

We’ll continue to host seasonal educational retreats, publish a monthly Substack newsletter, and create opportunities for growth in writing and community. And we’re just getting started.

We’ll host our first retreat as Midwest Women Who Write on Saturday May 16th in Columbia. Registration and details coming soon. You’ll find those here, and on our shiny new website at midwestwomenwhowrite.org.

Welcome to your writing community. We’re so glad you’re here.

What fun it was to begin our new year of retreats here together, in this light, on the last day of February. We’re looking forward to more. Details about our next event, happening in May, will drop soon.

Community Announcements

We’re adding a new section to this newsletter, specifically crafted for our community members to share announcements about their own work, upcoming events, or anything else that might pique the interest of Midwestern women writers. Do you have something to add? Send us a note at mowomenwhowrite@gmail.com

Freelance Social & Workshop with COMO Magazine and COMO Business Times

Writers, photographers, and designers are invited to join the COMO editorial team on March 17 for our first Freelance Social & Workshop — an afternoon of networking, learning, and creative conversation.

Designed for current and prospective contributors alike, this casual, open-house event offers the opportunity to meet fellow creatives, connect with our editors and publishers, and gain insight into what freelancing with COMO Magazine and COMO Business Times looks like.

The afternoon will feature team introductions, lunch and networking, an overview of our freelance process, an open Q&A with editors Jodie Jackson Jr. and Kelsey Winkeljohn, and publishers David Nivens and Chris Harrison, plus a style guide presentation from freelance copyeditor Karen Pasley.

General admission is free, with an optional add-on for professional headshots available from 11:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. (select the “General Public + Headshot” ticket if interested). Both in-person ticket options include lunch, and guests are welcome to come and go as their schedules allow.

Come meet the people behind the magazine — and the creative community that makes it possible. Visit www.comotickets.com to learn more and reserve your spot.

Poetry Set to Music

Emily Render will be setting poetry to music mid-April in Berger, Missouri. Find details about the house concert / art show here.

Poetry by Mary Oliver, Rumi, and more!

· Again and Again, by Rilke

· A Place, mash-up of multiple poems

· Nos Iremos, by Silvina Ocampo

· Rain, by Edward Thomas

· The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls, by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

Sharing poetry through music to inspire appreciation...hoping you will go home and get out the poems you love and turn them into a song!

International Women’s Day pop-up at Book/Shop etc.

Support women creatives at this pop-up event in Jefferson City this weekend, hosted by indie bookstore Book/Shop etc.

That’s What She Said

Hear more from this year’s inaugural speaker T’Keyah Thomas and other mid-Missouri women at That’s What She Said, an event shaped around the idea of creating “a platform for everyday women to share their extraordinary stories.”

OneMic

Miranda Craig is a co-creator of OneMic, a creative arts collective based in Columbia, Missouri. They host bi-monthly, open-mic style showcases aimed at spotlighting local talent and ensuring the community has a welcome space to be heard. The next showcase is on April 27th at Hitt Records, 6-9pm. Find them on Facebook and Instagram

The New Territory: The Black Midwest

The New Territory magazine recently released a new collection of Black Midwestern stories curated by DeAni Blake-Britton. She writes, “When presented with the opportunity to create a collection for The New Territory, I had no idea where to start. As with any other creative endeavor, I started with what I know. What I know is this: I am a Black woman living in a predominantly white state. I know that Missouri swells with rich Black history—a history that stretches beyond Lincoln and Harris-Stowe—the two HBCUs in the state.”

Read: The Black Midwest

Last February we gathered as Missouri Women Who Write at Serendipity Salon & Gallery for the very first time. There were almost twenty of us, excited to learn from our inaugural speaker Tina Casagrand Foss, founder and publisher of The New Territory Magazine.

In June, we met at Mt. Nebo Inn in Rocheport to devour food and sensory writing with Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, author, food journalist, and the OG behind this community of women writers.

In September, we were back at Serendipity to soak in Substack with author and producer Janet Lewis Saidi. And—to celebrate her new release Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist, which grew into its final form from her own Substack, The Austen Connection.

In November we returned to Mt. Nebo Inn to end this first season of retreats without a single speaker, but instead many of our own voices: readings by you, our community members. It was powerful, y’all.

In 2025 we had four retreats, grew our community to 40 members, ate four fabulous lunches together (thank you Cafe Berlin, Mt. Nebo Inn, and Matriarcha Coffee + Kitchen for feeding us) and made precious time for ourselves and our writing.

It was a beautiful first year. Magical, really. We’re so grateful to everyone who spoke, attended, lended venues, advice, and support.

We’re excited to make it happen again this year! We’ll start with the first retreat of 2026 at Mt. Nebo Inn, with a meditation on poetry with T’Keyah Thomas, a spoken word poet and jewelry designer based in Columbia, MO. As of this writing, we have 10 seats left! If you’d like to join us, please register here.

We’re so excited to have T’Keyah as our first speaker of 2026, and to continue to grow this community of women writers here in the Midwest!

Happy (almost) birthday to all of us. It’s going to be a great year.

We’ve arrived in Autumn, finally, and are nearing the end of the first year of retreats.

Our final retreat of 2025 is happening Saturday, November 8, at Mt. Nebo Inn in the charming river town of Rocheport. 🍂

We’re mixing things up a bit this time. Instead of a single speaker, we’re inviting you to read something—only if you’d like to—published or unpublished. We’ll try to keep readings around 3-5 minutes or less. This will be casual; you can decide that morning if you’d like to read or if you’d just like to listen.

As always, this is a great opportunity to gather in community and meet other writers, celebrate our craft with writing time and prompts, and share a delightful meal together. Tickets to this event are $35, and includes breakfast and lunch. You can register through this Google form until November 1, or until all 20 spots are filled. (As of this writing, there are only 10 left!)

If you’ve been curious about these retreats or searching for community in writing, this is the perfect time to see what Missouri Women Who Write is all about. We hope to see you in November!

We are so glad to welcome writer-producer Janet Lewis Saidi (AKA Plain Jane), author of The Austen Connection and the forthcoming book Pocket Portraits: Jane Austen, out September 30 from Simon & Schuster. During this workshop, we’ll hear how Janet used an innovative platform – Substack – to write about her obsession with Jane Austen, and how that’s changed her life. We hope it might change your life, too.

Hope to see y’all in September. Tickets are limited—be sure to grab yours while you can. So here’s that link to register one more time!

Happy summer everyone, and hello again from Missouri Women Who Write.

We had a really wonderful retreat in June at Mt. Nebo Inn with the spectacular Nina Mukerjee Furstenau. We talked about food writing, and more specifically sensory writing—because *whispers* that’s really the heart of food writing. We shared food memories that connected our pasts to present, pen to page, and each of us to another. Nina focused on sound, which is something in my decade of writing about food that I hadn’t thought enough about. But this sonic lens helped me write about my grandpa, who was a terribly terrifically loud eater, and the last time I heard him eat. You can read more on this soon over at my Substack, The Roots of It All. And if you’ve written something that this retreat inspired, please share it with us!

Next up!

We’re a month out from our summer retreat already, and thrilled to announce our autumn workshop, happening September 13 at Serendipity Gallery in Columbia, Mo. This is where we held our first workshop in February, and we’re excited to be back! You can register right here.

And now, to introduce our speaker: we are so glad to welcome writer-producer Janet Lewis Saidi (AKA Plain Jane), author of the forthcoming book Pocket Portraits: Jane Austen, out September 30 from Simon & Schuster. During this workshop, we’ll hear how Janet used Substack to write about her obsession with Jane Austen, and how that’s changed her life. We hope it might change your life, too. If you’re here on this platform, and you’re also into Jane Austen, you may have already heard of Janet’s Substack newsletter and podcast The Austen Connection (yep, that’s the obsession turned newsletter turned book!) And, in 2025 Austen fans worldwide are celebrating her 250th year in lots of ways, including a read along of all her works, which Janet is chronicling each week here on Substack. We are excited to be a part of this celebration of an iconic female writer and to gather in person to write and learn together as a way of continuing Jane Austen’s legacy, all the while crafting our own.

We're really thrilled about this one, y'all. Hope to see you in September!

Cheers,

Jessica + Sunitha

We’re skipping spring and heading straight for summer. Our next retreat will be June 21st at Mt. Nebo Inn in Rocheport, Mo. If you joined us last time, you can expect a similar format with the addition of writing prompts and outdoor writing space. For those of us whose writing is invigorated by a breath of fresh air, this is newsworthy. We’ll conclude with a lunch of wood-fired pizzas and salad, thanks to Mt. Nebo Inn.

Our Speaker + Topic

The topic: food writing! We are really delighted to welcome Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, award winning journalist and author, to talk about using food as a lens in storytelling. At the retreat, you’ll learn how to incorporate this magic into your own work, no matter the genre.

I’m extra excited about this announcement because Nina is the reason I’m a food writer. Journalism was the third (and final) major I tested in college, and this was a fresh change when I walked into a study abroad fair and met Nina, who was leading the Will Write for Food & Wine trip to Italy that summer. After a quick chat with her, I enrolled. And after that trip, I knew food writing was it for me. So, I got home and signed up for all of Nina’s classes, and the rest is living history. I’m so glad she’ll be sharing her magic with us at this retreat.

Our Sponsor

Hoot Design Company is sponsoring our speakers for the remainder of the 2025 season! We are super grateful to be collaborating with Hoot, whose business model empowers women in and outside of the workplace. If you don’t already subscribe to their newsletter, Parliament, get yourself on that list. You’ll be pleased!

This morning is going to be delicious, y’all. Registration opens 4/1. Want first dibs? Sign up to get the link sent straight to your inbox right here. If you attended our first retreat, you’re already on the list. And, we’ll send it out here too. Hooray! We hope to see you in June.

We look forward to meeting y’all at our inaugural writing retreat on February 22nd in Columbia, Missouri. This is the last week to register — which you can do here!

And, we can’t conclude without thanking Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, whose vision for this community of women writers is continued here. Thank you, Nina!

Hello from Missouri, and a Missouri woman who writes. There are a lot of us, and I’m glad. Missouri Women Who Write, in fact, is a place created just for us—to build community among writers of from all corners of the state.

This is the vision of founder Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, an award-winning Missouri-based food journalist and author, who began a retreat series under the name Women Who Write in 2024. Nina has generously passed her vision into the hands of Jessica Vaughn Martin, Sunitha Bosecker, and Anna Grey, three more Midwestern women who write.

The heart of this organization, like we said before, is to build community; we’re doing that first with half-day retreats, which aim to be useful, rejuvenating, and supportive for writers of all experience levels and genres. Bring us your poets, your novelists, your copywriters, journalists, academics and students, and whoever else wants to put a pen to paper and say something, feel something, do something with words.

Our first retreat is coming soon: February 22, 2025 in Columbia Missouri. We’re thrilled to have Tina Casagrand Foss, founder and publisher of The New Territory magazine, talk PLACEWRITING. We will have a morning refreshments, writing talks and writing time, then we’ll lunch. Registration closes on February 15th. You can sign up through this Google Form; please make sure to register if you plan to attend, otherwise they’ll be “no soup for you!” And we don’t anyone going soupless.

We’re excited to build this community of Missouri women writers. Follow along for updates on future retreats, writing meetups and groups, and other events.