the society of silent writers

They write but do not publish. The constitution is one paragraph long and forbids three things in particular: the press, the prize, and the introduction. A silent writer may keep a notebook, may correspond, may even circulate a letter or two in confidence; what they may not do is appear. The work is finished when finished; it is then placed in a drawer, or burned, or left where it lies. The society does not exist to discourage publication. It exists to make a space in which the question of publication does not have to be asked.

The members meet, in theory, on the last evening of February, in a back room of a hotel that has changed owners three times since the lease was signed. In practice many years pass between meetings, and when a meeting does occur, no minutes are kept. Those present read aloud a paragraph of their own work and one paragraph of someone else's. The reading is for the room, and for the carpet. Nothing is recorded; the log book is left, deliberately, in another country.

What is read tends to be small: a description of a window, the inside of a letter, a remembered rain. The society's archive — such as it is — survives only in the form of stray pages mixed into other people's papers. Several of its writers were also keepers of the private diary, or members of the society of unfinished works; one or two practised the more sociable marginalia.