It has rarely ever been a lucrative time to be a writer, yet within every epoch and era, it has always been necessary to write. I first met the writer and poet Marybeth Holleman in the early 2000s through creative writing circles at University of Alaska Anchorage. More recently, beginning around 2016, and thanks to Marybeth’s creative idea and organizational plan, we formed a loose-knit group of seven writers into something akin to a literary salon. For our LitSalon, we sometimes called ourselves the Salonistas. It wasn’t a book club, nor was its purpose to offer critiques or to prop up each other’s work. Our literary salon existed for literary friendship and to discuss, as writers, mostly contemporary work—poetry, nonfiction, fiction—to see what we, as writers, might learn from it. We read and discussed poems, essays, novel excerpts, and rotated meetings in various private homes.