The Writ. This used to be something.

Last Chapter.

The Writ was a publication (also called "WRIToracle") and writer's workshop that served over 5,000 members over the course of its life from 2003 - 2007. It was founded by Sarah Dopp, Julian Esteban Torres Lopez, Jeremiah Gould, and Tim Greenlaw. It had a large wonderful staff that was often spearheaded by Joe Gilbert, and it gathered a mad passionate community of writers who wanted to change the world

We loved The Writ. Hard. And we did change the world. But to everything there is a season, and it was time to let this one end.

Keep Building. Keep writing. And we're still around if you ever want to reminisce.

xo,
Sarah Dopp
Co-Founder, Webmistress, and Former Editor-in-Chief at TheWrit.org

p.s. Due to security issues that come with old programming, we've taken everything down. But you can still browse parts of the history by visiting the Internet Archive.

Epilogue.

The Writ is dead.

It’s a sad but true eventuality. The project began as a group: a poet, an organizer, a webmistress, and a calming voice. It grew into a community. In the beginning, it was an edited online journal overseen by Sarah Dopp. With the guidance of Jeremiah Gould, it soon evolved into a thriving online workshop. Under the later leadership of Julian Esteban Torres, The Writ grew to thousands of members from all over the world. However, it faded with time. With each of the founders and members finding new paths in their lives, the writ was slowly dying. In November of 2008, I began a blog post:

Despite the best efforts of The Writ’s finest minds, The Writ’s problems have always seemed to outweigh the energy and abilities of those trying to resolve them. From the beginning of the workshop back in 2004, we have struggled with a weak infrastructure and an incomplete site. Over the years, many of us have taken on the challenge of solving this from every angle we could think of. We applied for grants. We tried to go non-profit. We tried to go for-profit. We tried to create a formal organization to gain tax exempt status. But no matter what we do, it always seems like there are more problems than solutions, and that the solutions take more time and energy than anyone who loves the site can commit.

Mine was among the most recent surges to revive the drying dream. All summer I worked on organizational structure and fund raising plans, but continued to hit road blocks. In October, I took a trip to San Francisco and confessed to The Writ’s webmistress that I too had failed, and was ready to give in.

I then went on to talk about new hope. But again, I was misguided.

Each member of The Writ both old and new hoped to resurrect the site to its former glory and each, in their own way, and not for lack of passion or talent, failed. No one wanted to pull the plug on the dying site, but no one had the medicine to fix it either. The cure was passion and cash. Both were present, but the site needed more of each than any individual could offer, and there was no group to resurrect it.

Finally, this spring, the failing infrastructure gave way and the site crashed beyond repair. Now The Writ is tenuously held in thousands of pages of raw data, which we have in spreadsheets and word documents on our home computers. It may not be feasible to send everyone copies of the work they had posted to the site, but we will do our best to return work to the individuals who ask for it.

If you want us to try to return your work, send me an email at writservice at gmail.com, and I will do all I can to get it back to you. If possible, please do this from the email address that your Writ account was associated with.

The Writ was a beautiful dream. Its time had come.

Sincerely,

Timothy Greenlaw
Co-Founder and IPoS at TheWrit.org

Afterword.

Tim, you didn’t fail. I don’t think any of us did. We didn’t fulfill a dream, but that is not failure. Failure may have been not trying.

The infrastructure was needy, and we did the best we could to keep it together. That, and keeping in mind that we all had lives, grew up, matured, fell in love, broke up, moved, found new passions, enhanced old ones. In short, we had lives that too needed our attention.

We gave it all we had when we could give what we had. That’s all we could ask for.

I want to personally thank Tim, and everyone else (you know who you are) for every bit of you that you gave.

- Julian Esteban Torres Lopez
Co-Founder, Marketer, and Former Editor-in-Chief at TheWrit.org