Jane Underwood, longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, offers writing classes in our Writing & Literature category.

I never tire of hearing about the other member's lives. Last week Dan, who almost always makes me laugh, read a piece about his beginnings as a struggling songwriter. His first big break came, he said, when Glen Campbell and Tanya Tucker sang one of his songs on TV. He detailed the mounting anxiety he felt on the day the special was to air: "By noon I had high blood pressure. And at two, I got cancer. But I drank some tea and felt better."

Wally, our eldest member, moved away to Inverness last year. It's hard for him to keep driving into the city, so he sometimes hosts special "retreats" for us at his home. We do a potluck outside in his beautiful garden, and then spend the afternoon sharing our writing. At our last retreat, Wally wrote about true love: "It is not true that aging ends or even slows the desire for a lover's body. He wonders sometimes, so poignantly that tears come, how this woman and he arrived at this place together and at the same time. He decides that he must have dreamed her, designed her, and that she therefore came true out of his imagination. She still has the capacity to turn him inside out with her knowledge of his body."

Ah, Wally, dear Wally. I've heard you pooh pooh the idea that with age comes wisdom, but I guess that, at age 51, I'm still too young to understand or believe you.

My writing group was founded after a bunch of strangers, four men and six women, decided to form a writing group. I'd always thought of myself as a loner, not a group joiner —sort of a pen-wielding, earring-wearing James Dean—so I was surprised by how attached I was to the "us" that we had become. But I wanted to be a part of the group not only in order to keep improving on my writing, but because I was so captivated by the real life stories that we were sharing. Everyone was.

A year passed. Then two. Then three. Arlene and Helen had babies. Joe's mother died. Ted joined an experimental AIDS treatment program. Lynn got divorced. Janet got married. I got hot flashes. And more, much more.

Our lives fluctuated. People came and went. We had to reinvent ourselves more than once. When we were down to only four or five regular attendees, the subject of disbanding was broached. The group dynamics weren't always easy to deal with, and besides, the world of writing was just too frustrating. You put your heart and soul into 5,000 words that took six months to write, and what did you get? Publication in the Itsy Bitsy Teensy Weensy Yellow Polka Dot Review, published twice a year out of Corn Pone Junior College in Indiana. And your payment? Two complimentary copies.

But as we hovered on the brink of extinction, something in our collective DNA rallied, and we sought out another dwindling writer's group and proposed a merger. They agreed to give it a shot. Onward we went.

Over time we became more adept at dealing with attrition. I recruited new members from the writing classes that I began to teach. Once, after serving as a judge for a local literary contest, I became friends with one of the winners and invited him to come on board. He, in turn, recruited one of his neighbors.

Sometimes members will drop out, only to realize after a foray into the land of writer's isolation, that they miss our support. After a prodigal member returns, we politely refer to his or her former absence as "that time you went on hiatus."

Currently we have nine members ranging in age from Rachel—who 29 and often refers to my college years as "the olden days"—to Wally, who is 83 and can remember all the way back to before the Golden Gate Bridge even existed.

None of us has reached any great pinnacles of fame or fortune as writers, but as a collective entity, we've racked up a respectable list of bylines, with our names appearing everywhere from the Washington Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the New York Times to the Christian Science Monitor, Best Women's Erotica, and Salon.com. We've written books and appeared in anthologies. We've won writing contests and garnered awards. We've read our work on public radio and seen it performed on the stage. Dan and I even co-wrote a song for that famous CD, The Truckers Christmas Album. My last royalty check for those lyrics was for seventy-five cents. I had it framed.

But this year we celebrated our 10th anniversary, and that's worth more to me than any byline or royalty check. Fortunately, the pursuit of fame and fortune isn't what our writing group is all about.