23 January 2024
If you’ve been around for a few years, you know that most years, in the fall, I share a post marking another year of Articles Club. Last year, I missed that post – but it was for a good reason! Behind the scenes, a few of us were working on a very special guide, and I waited to post until it was ready. And now it is! Meet: The Articles Club Guide! Over the last eight years, we’ve fielded many questions about our beloved AC: What is an articles club?How can I start one?How can I find people to join?How have you kept this going for so long?? We are genuinely happy to answer these questions – all of us want to spread the good news of articles club! – but also, if you’re really interested in starting your own group, I don’t just want to answer a few questions: I want to dump everything I’ve learned, and all of my considerable enthusiasm for what this group has meant to my life, into your lap, in the hopes that you will, indeed, go on to start your own. That’s not always practical on a large scale. So — we made a guide! After brainstorming as a group, four of us got together and wrote out everything we know about starting and sustaining an articles club. Here’s a glimpse at the table of contents: Fun, right? We put everything together into a beautiful package and you can purchase it right here for $20. All proceeds will go toward funding our annual weekend together, so rest assured you’re contributing to adult friendship bracelets, brownies-still-gooey-from-the-oven, and a polar plunge off the lakeside cabin’s dock. (Eep! We’re going with a Parent Trap theme this year, so it only seemed appropriate. Bathing suits will be
13 June 2023
When I hosted my first book swap in 2019, it was such fun that we vowed to make it an annual thing, or at most an every-other-year affair. Well… you know what happened next. But here we are, four years later, living our best readerly lives at a book swap once again, and it was a delight. In case it might inspire some of you to host a swap of your own, I’d love to share some photos and details from this weekend. (And if you’re just here to vicariously enjoy our readerly shenanigans, that’s a-ok, too.) This time around, my beautiful friend Bethany agreed to be my co-host. She’s an avid reader, a wonderful cook, and an even better friend – plus, she has an inviting home with many large surfaces on which to display books (so you can see why she was a slam-dunk pick). One Paperless Post invitation later, our guests were a mixture of Articles Club gals, preschool mom pals, and neighborhood buddies, plus a smattering of book-loving friends from other corners of our respective lives. It can feel a little nerve-wracking to bring together different groups of friends, but books are the great uniter, aren’t they? We invited 24 guests and had about 16 attend with summer travel and a few last-minute sick kiddos. Food for a book swap brunch We opted to host this year’s book swap in the morning – 10am – and so we kicked off the party by piling plates high with brunch food: two kinds of quiche; mini white chocolate baguettes from a local bakery; a mini pancake platter with nutella, soft butter, and syrup; smoked salmon sliders; and a monochromatic fruit salad inspired by a long-ago Cup of Jo post. (I’ve been holding on to that inspiration for
28 March 2023
“Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age,” Jennifer Senior noted in an Atlantic piece last year. “It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.” And yet, despite all of its virtues and joys, many of us find friendship something we puzzle over as grown-ups: how to make friends? How to keep friends? How to care for our friends, and find time to actually enjoy their company? After all, says Senior, once we graduate, “we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together.” And so, as adults, we must develop our own friendship practices, habits, and rhythms. Because I’m personally always looking for inspiration, I thought it might be fun to share a few “case studies” of successful friendships in my own life. They’re anonymous, but only lightly so – if you’ve been here awhile, you’ll surely know who I’m talking about. All part of the fun :) This post turned out to be extravagantly long, so I’ve split it into two parts – three today and three in a future edition! Case Study No. 1: The former coworkers turned friends How we met: We worked together at a small business. I worked there first, and advocated for L’s hiring – we had connected via our blogs while she was still in college. From her writing, I knew she would be perfect for the role, and we were kindred spirits from the start once we finally met in person. (Still are :)) K and I have a particularly good meet-cute: the first time we met, at a reader event I was hosting for work, she came up to me and blurted out, “I know where you live.” Not creepy
9 February 2023
If you’re not familiar with the history of Articles Club, you might be surprised to know how it started: with a gathering of a dozen or so strangers in my living room, united only by their love for reading interesting writing and discussing interesting ideas (and the fact that they read either my or Stephanie’s blog, ha). Over the last seven years, most of those strangers have moved on, replaced over time by a sturdier and sturdier group of acquaintances, then friends, then members of a group text (don’t laugh – the advent of the group text was a big moment in the friendship evolution!). We’ve welcomed babies, we’ve weathered a pandemic, and now – we’ve stayed in house together for the weekend. It was, as you might imagine, a delight. I’d love to share a few details, if you’d like to see! Thank you to many of the AC gals for sharing these photos! And if you’re wondering why Club is sometimes spelled Clurb, it is not a typo – just a bit of an inside joke :) Planning a weekend retreat: Articles Club currently has 12 members – that’s a lot of ladies (and husbands and kids and pets back home) to organize! So we started early. After casually discussing the idea of a weekend retreat for a few months, we polled the group in August to gauge availability of January and February weekends. (And I mean literally polled – we used Doodle.) We felt a winter getaway would be cheaper, easier to coordinate, and would give us something to look forward to after the holidays. Once we had a weekend that worked with everyone’s schedule, we split up into committees. The committees were thus: Logistics, Activities, Food, Beverage, and Surprises & Swag. Logistics researched rentals, booked the