Arts and Culture

Inside a NaNoWriMo Write-In

KBIA | By Davis Dunavin

Published November 18, 2011 at 4:48 PM CST

Outside the Art Smith photography studio on East Broadway in Columbia, Mo.

November is National Novel-Writing Month. (NaNoWriMo for short.) It’s a cultural phenomenon, spread virally through blogs and forums, in which amateur writers, experts and everyone in between are challenged to write a complete novel over the course of a month. A lot of people take on this task solo, but a group in Columbia bands together every year to write novels alongside each other. Here’s their story.

Arts and Culture

Davis Dunavin

Davis Dunavin grew up in the bootheel of Missouri and worked for the Southeast Missourian and Off! Magazine before moving to New York City in 2006, where he worked as a freelance writer and a bookstore clerk. He's a Masters student in Journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and served as a Convergence Journalism teaching assistant at KBIA before launching the Word Missouri project in August. He lives in Columbia with his wife Elizabeth, coincidentally also a bookstore clerk and organizer of the Cold Reading poetry series at Get Lost Bookshop in downtown Columbia. When he's not there, he can sometimes be found leading a double life as a street musician.

See stories by Davis Dunavin