the society of unfinished works

Each member maintains, throughout their life, one work that will not be finished. The work may be a book, a building, a translation, a piece of music, a garden, a letter to a friend. It must be begun in earnest, advanced with attention, and never completed. A member who finishes their work — by accident, by impatience, by death — forfeits their membership; the work is removed from the registry; the member is, with affection, struck off.

The society meets when it can. There is no calendar. A meeting is called by sending a postcard with a single date written on the back; if four members reply, the meeting is held; if fewer, the date passes. At a meeting, each member reads one page of their unfinished work, chosen at random by the member themselves opening the manuscript without looking. The reading is the meeting

The society overlaps in temperament with the silent writers and in personnel with the keepers; an unfinished work is, in its way, a kept item. The longest-running work in the registry, begun 1907, is a translation of a poem of seven lines; the translator is now ninety-one and has translated, by his own count, six of the lines, of which he is satisfied with two. Several of the works are documented separately in the apocrypha and in the book of unfinished poems.