What started out at a fiction feedback group in a small theater bar in Amsterdam’s center has grown into a fledgling global community.
Founders Ashanya Lingam, Derville Quigley, and Emil Cholich spun off from that original group and started Strange Birds in 2020. With Covid hitting, our bi-weekly meetings traded sticky bar floors for the cozy webcam boxes of a Zoom window.
All of a sudden, a lot more people wanted to join and not just from Amsterdam. We had writers from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the US dialing into our events. So, to accomodate them, we started more groups, or helped them start their own.
After that, some of the folks in those groups wanted to do other things—interview writers they admire, or host a writing festival—So we helped them do that too.
Our current MeetUp page has 1700+ members and it’s still growing. Each group is host-run, and the founders themselves are not involved in the day-to-day running of individual sessions.