What Is Monday Night Anthology?
What happens when a group of people write together every Monday night for 6 years? Inevitably, collaboration!
In our case it was fairly textbook. One day, we got an idea: What if we all wrote a story with the same bizarre title, to see how differently we might interpret that title? We mulled it over from different angles, at first in a joking way, with a this is quite silly, we’re not actually thinking of doing this are we sort of mindset. But as with all worthwhile ideas, it simmered and grew until one day when we talked about it, it became clear that we were no longer joking.
Why not do it? We thought to ourselves. There was no good reason not to.
So, we wrote. At first, it was just this one idea. But then we got another. And another.
It became a game; what prompt would we write to next? What challenges would we incorporate in each story? Sometimes we talked about our ideas beforehand; sometimes we swore ourselves to secrecy until the last word had been written. Often we’d talk about some unifying concept we all had to include: a name, a location, a word, a day. Occasionally we just sat together, set the timer, and wrote.
The results were something similar to magic. Given the exact same prompt, it became truly fascinating the variances our group produced. We wrote in different styles, different genres, different points of view.
We always critique our stories afterwards, a process where we all read a piece and discuss it as a group while the author listens but does not talk. Often, the stories were so surprising that they provoked hour-long discussions that left us all exhilarated at the possibilities of the narrative. Even more often, we discovered new appreciations for genres we didn’t normally read, simply because we loved an author’s story so much.
It’s been two years since we began collaborating at this level, and in that time we’ve grown as authors and readers both. We’ve moved from being a group of writers to a true collaborative. We believe we’ve created something special in this series of stories, and we want to share it with the world.
The Monday Night Anthology series was born from this idea: one prompt, one book, many different takes. It celebrates the uniqueness each author and story brings to the collection—and at the same time, the anthology model brings a special completeness to the prompt that would not be achieved by standalone stories.
The first book in the Monday Night Anthology series is Boys, Book Clubs, and Other Bad Ideas. It will be released on September 25th, and we plan for it to be followed by many other volumes in the future. If you’re curious about our work, want to find a new favorite story, or perhaps explore a few different genres than usual, then this is the series for you!
Happy readings,
Maria
