What Is This Group?

Atlanta Tuesday Literary Writers is a group of writers who write primarily literary novels and short stories as defined in the essay “What Is Literary Fiction?”

We meet fortnightly (in-person only) to discuss and critique two to four excerpts of up to 6,000 words (though more typically 2,500-5,000) uploaded six days before each meeting. Some of us also give the author in-file comments and markup.

We are loosely affiliated with Atlanta Writers Club, to which nearly all of our active members also belong.

We are a 100% in-person group. We do not host online meetings.

Our members vary in level of skill and experience. “Literary” is not an assessment of value or quality but purely a description of style and target readership. Thus we are not snobs about the value or quality of literary versus commercial (i.e., popular / genre / mass-market) writing, acknowledging that they satisfy different appetites, most often for different readerships, and that both types exhibit a mutually comparable spectrum of skill and quality. Many of us enjoy reading some popular fiction in addition to our primary diet of literary writers. We simply find that critique is more useful when it comes from other writers who understand the ways in which literary fiction colors outside the lines of convention, genre, and craft lore that govern more commercial writing.

Our meetings focus on discussion, encouragement, and improvement of excerpts, and occasionally on presentations and discussions about craft topics per se. Since our discussion bandwidth is limited, we leave to other groups the topics of self-promotion and pursuit of publication or representation. We also do not discuss poetry, screenplays, or genre-adjacent hybrids like “literary children’s,” “literary young adult,” “literary horror,” etc.