Join fellow writers in discussing writing as a whole, from creativity, finding inspiration, the act of writing, to publication - and everything else in between!  There are no set topics on a meeting-by-meeting basis, but come prepared to have plenty of civil discussion and to learn from others.

Please understand that Aspects of Writing is not a writers group, workshop, place to share critique, or otherwise discuss unpublished works.  If interested, email Zack at zstvan@manliuslibrary.org for questions and inquiries.

In June, local author Linda Lowen will host a roundtable discussion on writing and her career.

A book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Linda covers both adult nonfiction/memoir and young adult fiction. She’s published nonfiction in the Sunday New York Times and in “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less” (Artisan Books, December 2020).  Her writing advice has appeared in The Writer and Writer’s Digest magazines. And her two travel/tourism books about her hometown — “100 Things to Do in Syracuse Before You Die” (Reedy Press, April 2022) and Secret Syracuse: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure (Reedy Press October 2023) — have sold over 5,000 copies. She’s currently researching a third book, “Unique Eats and Eateries of Syracuse,” forthcoming in Spring 2026.

After a decade of teaching creative nonfiction at the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse, NY, she founded AlwaysWantedToWrite.com which offers online writing classes. Linda has presented at writing conferences from the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival to HippoCamp, the annual nonfiction conference of Hippocampus magazine. She’s a theater reviewer for the Syracuse Post-Standard / syracuse.com and a member of the American Theater Critics and Journalists Association, as well as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She also writes about books for Reader’s Digest online at RD.com.

In her former 20-year career as a radio and television producer/host, she earned numerous local, regional, and national awards. As the Women’s Issues expert for the New York Times Company-owned website About.com (now ThoughtCo.com), she produced over 2500 pieces of original content and ranked #1 on Google for the search term ‘women’s issues.’