“Now is the time to get started,” English Teacher Alissa Mears said, picking up her pencil.
In her 20th year of teaching and 12th year of motherhood, Mears knew it was time to do something for herself. She pursued her lifelong hunger for writing by submitting her application to the London Library Emerging Writers Program, a year-long seminar for aspiring writers.
“When I applied, my youngest son had just turned four, and I really felt like I’d devoted this chunk of 11 years to being a mother, taking care of kids, teaching, taking care of students,” Mears said. “The time felt right for me to do something that was my own, and writing felt my own.”
This year, 40 writers were selected from 1,700 applicants to join the program. The chosen few are granted a year-long membership to the London Library, writing masterclasses, networking opportunities and peer feedback groups.
Since being accepted into the program over the summer, Mears said she is often planted in the “quiet, wonderful, musty-smelling” book stacks of the London Library, escaping the loudness of her home to write.
Mears said writers must propose a project they plan to develop during the program as part of the application process. For Mears, this was a series of personal essays and a novel that retells the myth of Prometheus with a “feminist slant” — two ideas she said have been brewing for the past few years.
“The essays deal with the personal aspects of life but through the line of feminism and feminist scholars,” Mears said. “I’ve been working with their language and ideas within the construct of personal stories.”
Although Mears has participated in many writing groups throughout her life, she said the London Library’s influential presence sets the program apart from those that purely rely on the initiative of the writers.
“Here I feel like there’s real value being put on developing us as writers,” Mears said. “It’s really wonderful to feel both pushed creatively and held emotionally.”
Mears said an essential part of her creative process is collaborating with other writers for feedback and inspiration, which the London Library Emerging Writers Program encourages through peer groups.
“I love coming up with ideas through conversation, and then once I’ve written something, I think it’s deeply satisfying to get feedback,” Mears said. “I’ve always been in writing groups where I feel like I’m leveling up with the writers I’m in the group with. I see how talented they are, and it makes me want to be a better writer.”
In addition to creative growth, Mears said consistently writing offers her deeper insight into connecting with her students.
“I realized at some point this is actually really feeding me as a parent, and me as a friend and me as a teacher,” Mears said. “I saw as I was writing alongside my students, quite literally, and thought, ‘Oh, I can talk to them in a different way about what they’re going through, and I can talk through feedback with them in a different way now that I’m actively engaged in that process as well.’”
Mears said the London Library Emerging Writers Program also offers an exciting new space of personal reflection and an opportunity for further independence outside of being a teacher.
“Writing is something that can be so intensely solitary,” Mears said. “I was really hungry for that solitude, and I was really hungry to be thinking about things outside these caretaking structures of being a parent, of being a teacher. Who am I if I were to rip back all this scaffolding of what I’ve been doing the last 20 years? Where am I and what do I want to do?”
Mears said the pronounced, sometimes confessional presence of her life in her personal essays is an act of reclamation and an expression of power.
“Women have been buttoned up for so long,” Mears said. “It feels like an assertion of self, and it feels like a refusal to let shame dominate. Shame really does interest me, and it interests me in a way that I don’t want to just sit with it by myself. I want to take it out and look at it and explore it and be in dialogue about it, something London Library is really enabling me to do.”
