How It Works

If you enjoy painstakingly crafted essays by insightful writers but always felt the medium needed a greater degree of risk and conflict, then Write Club is your modern-day Circus Maximus. Our diligent crew of bout promoters seek out up-and-coming authors, battle-scarred journalists, offbeat performance poets, and every sort of artist in between, then assign them competing topics and the directive to prepare an essay of no longer than seven minutes that will vanquish their opponent.

Originally coined by Write Club Founder and Overlord Ian Belknap, the term “live lit” describes a writing and performance style that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with onstage storytelling. But while storytelling emphasizes the delivery of narrative, live lit offers an opportunity to craft personal thoughts and truths into an essay format and then perform that essay in front of a captive audience.

Ian describes the value of this art form in this 2019 Chicago Reader article, reflecting on Write Club’s tenth anniversary:

”If we are to progress, or even simply to endure, our shows must cleave to what live lit remains at its essence, which is after all what makes it exciting: a readily accessible means of direct public self-expression, a forum for truth telling and revelation without adornment or pyrotechnics. One of the great virtues of live lit is its “low prestige factor,” in that the barriers to entering as a practitioner are really, really low: none of us who produce these shows need your CV, there are no conservatory programs where you can earn an MFA in live lit, there is no “dues paying” in the sense of doing a shitload of open mikes before you’re deemed “ready.” If you want in, all you need to do is ask.”