E-Mail This Article to a Friend Putting in a good word With its new downtown headquarters, Grub Street, Inc. has cemented its place at the center of literary Boston BY MIKE MILIARD
	Related Links GRUB STREET, Inc. The official site. Has the lowdown on all their course offerings and social events. CHRIS CASTELLANI Get information about The Saint of Lost Things, the new book from Grub Street’s artistic director. SUSAN ORLEAN Official site for the New Yorker staff writer, author of My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere (Random House), and Grub Street advisory-board member.

In the early 19th century, London’s Grub Street was populated by whores, drunks, and thieves. It was also the center of England’s growing — if, more often than not, down-at-the-heels — literary world, a place inhabited, wrote Samuel Johnson, by "writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems."

If you had told Eve Bridburg in the late-20th century that Grub Street Writers — the non-degree-granting fiction workshops she founded in 1997 — would become the locus of Boston’s belles-lettres, she wouldn’t have believed you. She taught small groups in modest spaces for the love of it. She had no grand designs to establish a humming hive, smack in the middle of downtown Boston, for writers both established and aspiring. But after eight years of struggle, growing in fits and starts, Grub Street, Inc. has joined the ranks of other well-respected literary hubs like the Loft in Minneapolis and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Part literary commune, part MFA-type training ground, it’s become this city’s center for those who write seriously, or who wish to.

Newly ensconced in spacious headquarters overlooking Boston Common, re-established as a nonprofit whose hunger to grow financially robust has redoubled and whose board is peopled with literary luminaries, Grub Street has indeed transcended its humble beginnings. More than just a place to get the sort of intensive personal writing instruction that adult ed and MFA programs often can’t provide, it’s become the all-purpose help center and social core of the city’s writing community.

"Boston has this great literary history, but I feel like all the other art forms get more attention these days," Bridburg says. "This place is thick with writers. We want to get people to realize who’s living down the street from them, and what they’ve been working on in their pajamas for the last three years."

THE WRITE FIT

Eve Bridburg has founded an international bookstore in the Czech Republic and farmed a commune in Oregon. When she arrived in Boston for grad school at BU, she didn’t figure she’d be sticking around for long. But after getting her degree in 1996, she teamed with classmate Julie Rold to try something new. She wanted to teach fiction, and she wanted to do it her way. The two struck upon the idea of intensive workshops tailored to people who don’t have the time or money for traditional degree programs.

The name Grub Street was meant to emphasize the workshops’ street-level ethos, teaching outside of the halls of academe, with doors open to anyone — young or old, rich or poor, aspiring to craft high literature or bang out pulp fiction. In the beginning, there were just a handful of students and two instructors, with fiction the only offering. But within a couple of years there were nearly 100 students learning poetry, screenwriting, creative nonfiction, and playwriting from more than a dozen teachers. Grub Street even had a success story early on, with the publication, in 1998, of Fiction II enrollee Jamie Katz’s mystery novel, Dead Low Tide (HarperCollins). Things were going gangbusters.

"It really organically took off pretty quickly," says Bridburg, "as a community, as opposed to a profitable business. It never made much money." There was the rub. In 2001, after having two children in close succession, Bridburg decided she "just couldn’t afford to do it anymore." So she thought about closing shop. But when word got out, the torrent of supportive outcry from students past and present surprised her. In its short life, Grub Street had become a community, fostering friendships and even marriages. For many, it had become indispensable.

Bridburg considered handing the reigns over to someone else. But potential suitors balked. "No one individual should work this hard for this little money," Bridburg says. Then she had another idea. Maybe Grub Street, which by then was headquartered in smallish digs in an old toilet-paper factory in Union Square, could survive as a nonprofit. "If this is something that the city values," Bridburg thought, "we need to spread the word and get people involved, to raise money to add to the money that we earn, to make it a healthier institution, one that’s going to outlast my energy."

And, in 2002, that’s exactly what happened. Grub Street is now overseen by a 10-person board, of which Bridburg is the president. It has an advisory council of high-profile authors like New Yorker writer (and former Phoenix staffer) Susan Orlean, and Memoirs of a Geisha author Arthur Golden. It has a freshly minted artistic director in long-time head instructor Chris Castellani. Its other instructors include critically acclaimed authors Jessica Shattuck (The Hazards of Good Breeding), Steve Almond (My Life in Heavy Metal), and Jennifer Haigh (Baker Towers). It subsists on tuition, piecemeal donations, and grants from big-ticket benefactors. It has more classes and seminars than ever, and spacious headquarters with classrooms to hold them in. (Not to mention a living room, kitchen, and library.)

CLASS ISSUES

But how does one teach writing anyway? Grammar and sentence structure, sure. Composition. But how do you take a person who wants to write a sci-fi short story, or poem, or personal essay, and tell them how to do it? Artistic director Castellani, 32, recites a maxim he learned long ago: "Writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned.

"The very basic thing that writing workshops do is to get you to do the work. Get your ideas out. Get them on the page. And then you see how people react to them. It’s a very powerful thing, to create something and see other people respond to it." It’s that interaction with fellow students that’s most valuable. "All a teacher can really do is facilitate the discussion and give insightful tips. The more you do, the more you start to see what works and what doesn’t work."

At Grub Street, says Castellani, the operative words are "rigorous but supportive."

"Truthful but not damaging," echoes Bridburg.

"Sometimes there’s a piece that’s perfectly structured and a perfect arc, but at the sentence level there are clichés, there are easy metaphors, there are all kinds of inconsistencies in the way that the dialogue is working," Castellani says. "Sometimes, there’s beautiful, beautiful phrasing and imagery, but there’s no story, no structure at all."

It’s the instructors’ job, and that of the fellow students, to point out those flaws while remaining supportive of the writer, to help make their work shine while preserving its ineffable personal stamp. "We try to make it so, if it’s a mystery, it’s the best mystery it can be," says Castellani, who’s just published his second novel, The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin). "If it’s an imagist poem, it’s the best imagist poem it can be. It’s not trying to turn the poem into the kind of poem the teacher says it could be, it’s about trying to make it the best poem the student wants it to be."