The Anthology That Made Us Family
Twelve strangers, one shared spine, and friendships bound tighter than the book.
The book that changed my life sold eighty-one copies, and I am related to at least thirty of the buyers. By every measure publishing cares about, our anthology was a failure. By every measure I care about, it is the reason I have somewhere to be on the last Sunday of every month, and eleven people who would drive through the night for me.
It started, like most of my bad decisions and all of my good ones, with a comment I typed too fast.
Three years ago I was posting poems on a community wall for poets, mostly at hours that suggested I was not sleeping well. I was new to the city, working remotely, and had reached the stage of loneliness where you thank the delivery driver twice. The wall was my social life. A woman called Marisol kept leaving comments on my poems that were better than the poems. One night she posted a piece about eating dinner standing up at the counter because a table for one felt like an accusation, and I typed, without thinking: 'Someone should put twelve of us lonely counter-eaters in one book so at least our poems can live together.'
I meant it as a joke.
Marisol replied in nine minutes: 'Okay. You're the editor. I'll do the shortlist.'
This is how I became the editor of an anthology despite being unqualified in every way except the one that mattered, which was that I said yes before I could think about it.
We recruited off the wall like it was a heist film. Marisol found Old Tom, seventy-four, a retired train driver who wrote sonnets about his late wife with the meter of a man who had spent forty years listening to rails. I found Keiko, who wrote about night shifts at a care home. Someone knew someone who knew Bram, a Dutch bricklayer whose poems were so spare they looked like they had been sanded. Twelve of us, in the end. Six countries. Age range twenty-two to seventy-four. Not one of us had ever been in a book.
The theme came from a prompt that started it all, one Marisol had saved for months: write about the table you eat at. Twelve poets, twelve tables. Old Tom's table still had two chairs. Keiko's was the fold-down tray of a nurses' station. Mine was a counter, standing up. We called the book 'Set For One' and we were unbearably pleased with ourselves.
What I expected: a fun project, three months, a PDF.
What happened: family, with all the paperwork that implies.
The group chat was meant to be logistics. Within six weeks it was everything else. Bram announced his divorce to us before his brothers, typing at 1 a.m., 'the table poem is nonfiction now,' and eleven people in six time zones sat with him till sunrise, passing the conversation west like a candle. When Keiko's care home went into lockdown, Old Tom mailed her a cassette of himself reading her own poems back to her, because, he said, 'a poet should hear her work in a granddad voice at least once.' She told us she played it in the supply cupboard on the worst nights.
We edited each other the way only people who like you will dare to. Marisol cut my favourite stanza and wrote in the margin, 'This is you performing sadness. Two lines down is you actually sad. Keep her.' I was furious for a day... and grateful for three years. Nobody at any job has ever read me that closely. My own family has not read me that closely. There is an intimacy in being edited well that I can only compare to someone learning your tea order, if your tea order were your soul.
The book itself nearly killed us twice.
Our first printer went bankrupt holding our deposit. Then, one week from the reprint, Old Tom had a fall and went quiet... and twelve people discovered the group had a phone tree nobody remembered building. Marisol reached his daughter in four hours. The book waited. Books wait. That was the moment I understood what we had actually made, because not one person asked about the deadline.
We came for the book. We stayed because twelve lonely people, stapled together, stop being lonely.
Launch day was a Zoom call, because six countries. Eighty-one copies sold, as I said. But there is a photograph from that call I keep on my desk: twelve rectangles, twelve kitchens, and in every single rectangle a person holding the same slim book against their chest like a passport. Old Tom, recovered enough to attend, held his copy next to a framed photo of his wife so, he said, she could see he finally got in print. Nobody spoke for a moment... Zoom kept helpfully switching the spotlight to whoever sniffed loudest.
People ask what the anthology did for my career, and the honest answer is almost nothing. One review, kind but brief. A few of us later sent individual poems to a monthly poetry contest, and Keiko placed once, and the group chat behaved like a nation winning the World Cup. But careers were never the point. I had read plenty about writing community stories before this, and they always sounded slightly invented to me, too warm to be real. Then I lived inside one and discovered the warmth is real and also that it smells like printer toner and someone's third coffee.
Because here is the thing about a shared spine. My poem sits four pages from Bram's divorce and six from Old Tom's empty chair.
Our worst nights are literally bound together.
You cannot pull one poem out without the stitching showing. After three years I have stopped being able to tell whether I mean the book or us.
Two of us, it turned out, lived ninety minutes apart. Marisol took a train on a wet Tuesday and we finally sat at a real table, the kind with two chairs, two coffee cups cooling between us while we talked for five hours about line breaks and her mother and my counter and whether Bram would ever admit he was in love with Keiko. (He has since admitted it. The group chat survived, barely.) At some point I looked down at the table, two cups, two rings of coffee, and thought... this is the sequel. Set for two.
The loneliness that drove me to that wall three years ago has not vanished... exactly. I have just stopped writing about loneliness from inside it. Now I write about it the way you describe a town you used to live in. I remember the address. I know people still stuck there. I keep leaving comments on their poems at 2 a.m., better than the poems if I can manage it, because that is how someone once found me.
Eighty-one copies. Eleven people. One spine.
Best failure of my life.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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