Our Philosophy

A Write & a Pint Manifesto

We believe stories are not luxuries.
They are not ornaments for the idle hours or accessories to life’s “real” business.
Stories are the pulse in the throat of human culture — the language we use to feel, to think, to remember, to imagine ourselves into being.

We gather because the world is not finished.
It is never finished.
Each voice, each pen, each conversation in the quiet backroom of a London pub adds a thread to the fabric we share.

We are a writing community. But more than that:
We are a space for creative enquiry, a commons of imagination where writing becomes a way to wrestle with the big questions — the ones Camus asked on the edge of absurdity, the ones Baldwin demanded in the face of injustice, the ones Maggie Nelson traced through the fluidity of identity, and the ones we discover for ourselves when we dare to sit in the mystery without rushing toward a neat conclusion.

1. Writing as an Act of Freedom

To write is to refuse passivity.
It is to say: I will not only consume the narratives given to me; I will participate in making them.

Our community draws on the existential tradition in which meaning is not handed down, but made — in choice, in action, in the courage to create. Nietzsche reminds us that we are “poets of our lives,” free to sculpt, dismantle, and reinvent the self. Beckett shows us how to sit with uncertainty, even despair, and keep going. In this way, the page becomes a space of resistance — against resignation, against silence, against the flattening of nuance.

We don’t gather to churn out marketable content or chase formulaic “success.” We gather to wrestle with ideas, to sharpen our craft, to find the authentic edge of what we mean to say, and to say it anyway.

2. The Commons of the Pub

The pub is not incidental to our work — it is part of the philosophy.
It’s a place where voices mingle, hierarchies soften, and strangers can become co-conspirators in the making of meaning. It reminds us that writing does not exist in a vacuum; it lives in conversation, in laughter, in the clink of glasses and the warmth of shared space.

We inherit a tradition here — the pub as a democratic salon, as a people’s parliament, as the locus of song, storytelling, and political dreaming. Žižek might call it a messy, joyful negotiation of the Real; Joseph Campbell might see in it a modern-day campfire around which myths are remade. We see it as both: a place where the work of writing is inseparable from the work of relating.

3. Mutual Care and Collective Rising

A Write & a Pint is built on mutual care. We do not weaponise critique, and we do not mistake cynicism for intelligence. We hold space for each other’s tentative sentences and half-formed thoughts because we know they are the seedlings of something vital.

Bell Hooks wrote that love is “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” We believe these are not just personal virtues but creative necessities. We learn from Judith Butler that our vulnerability is not a weakness but a condition of our shared humanity. We read each other’s work with attentiveness because we know the act of being seen can change a writer’s life.

We reject the myth of the solitary genius. We rise together — augmenting, amplifying, and refining our creative intellect in community. When one of us grows, all of us grow.

4. Creativity as Life Practice

Our workshops are not only about developing stories; they are about developing the storyteller. We see writing as a way to live — a method for thinking critically, feeling deeply, and engaging with the world.

Jung speaks of individuation: the process of integrating the many parts of the self. For us, writing is one such process — a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, between the self and the collective, between the page and the body.

This is why we read widely, write boldly, and speak freely. We do not limit our references to literature alone; we draw from philosophy, politics, visual art, music, and the lived experience of our members. We are postmodernists in the best sense — open to multiplicity, suspicious of single stories, and attuned to the power relations that shape whose voices are heard.

5. Unfinished, Together

A manifesto is, by nature, unfinished.
So is a community.
So is a life.

We resist the temptation to define ourselves once and for all. We choose, instead, to remain in motion — to adapt, to evolve, to keep the conversation alive. Like Cixous, we write toward what we do not yet know. Like Angela Davis, we connect imagination with the work of liberation. Like Baldwin, we understand that the act of telling our truth can be both deeply personal and profoundly political.

We invite every member to co-create this space. You bring your stories, your questions, your contradictions, and they become part of the whole. You influence the atmosphere, the direction, the tone of our gatherings. You help decide what this community will be next year, and the year after, and the year after that.

6. Our Commitments

We commit to protecting the psychological safety of our members, so they can write from the vulnerable edges of their experience without fear of dismissal or ridicule.

We commit to encouraging risk — in form, in thought, in feeling — so that our work might break new ground rather than merely replicate what has been done.

We commit to engaging with the world, not retreating from it, using writing as a way to participate in culture rather than escape it.

We commit to joy. To celebration. To laughter in the pub after a hard but satisfying piece of writing. To friendship as an art form in itself.

The Invitation

If you are looking for a place to write formulaic pieces without challenge, this is not for you.
If you want to be told exactly what to write, this is not for you.
If you seek certainty above curiosity, this is not for you.

But —

If you want to write in a space where your voice matters…
If you want to engage with ideas that unsettle, stretch, and transform you…
If you believe creativity can be both a private joy and a public good…
If you want to belong to a living tradition of writers who meet not only to write but to live more fully —

…then pull up a chair.
Order a pint.
Open your notebook.

Let’s make something together that the world didn’t know it was missing.