Clerkenwell Writers Asylum

Clerkenwell Writers Asylum has published its fourth anthology of short stories, writes David Douce.

The group started in 2008, after members of a creative writing course at London’s CityLit decided to carry on meeting and writing after the end of their course. It has evolved over the years, with some of the original members leaving, and new members joining. We have retained a focus on short fiction, but have added non-fiction and other prose forms when members choose to write them.

Publishing the collections of stories has helped to give the group cohesion and keeps up a certain momentum. It is a co-operative effort, with editing, proof-reading, selecting and deciding the order of stories, adding introductions and final assembly of the book shared between the members.

Seeing the final product as a published book may be one of the reasons why the group has held together and kept functioning for so long. Before Covid we met every three weeks or so in the Free Word Centre in Clerkenwell, with several pubs handy for carrying on the discussions. Covid has of course forced us onto Zoom, and sadly the Free Word Centre has now closed. Undaunted, we have found a pub in Clerkenwell with an available meeting room, and intend to start again with real human meetings as soon as the situation allows this.

The group has a core of six or seven members who have kept together over Zoom, but we hope that once we can start meeting in person again we will be joined by new members, or perhaps previous members will return. There are no formalities about membership, a willingness to read stories before meetings does help as we do not read them out during the meetings.

Anyone interested in joining the group might consider taking a look at any (or all) of our anthologies, all available on Amazon at astonishingly low prices. And if even after reading the stories the intention persists, we can be contacted through clerkenwellwriters@gmail.com or clerkenwellwritersasylum@wordpress.com