A literary salon for men over fifty

A room for whatever you’ve been meaning to say.

Here is the plan. Eight or ten of us at a table on a weeknight. Someone reads something short out loud, and we talk about it the way people talk on the walk back to the car after a good movie, which is to say honestly. Then we write for fifteen minutes. Anyone who wants to reads his page back. No one has to. No one is graded. No one wears a name tag.

I have come to believe the reading is just the way in. What happens after it, the talk and the writing, is the part that gets harder to find after fifty.

See an evening Ask about the first salon

First group: Baltimore/DC, in person, weeknights 7 to 9. Date and place to come, once enough of you raise a hand.

10/19/2026

The Vent, fifteen minutes in. Nobody sees your page but you, unless you decide otherwise.

“Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only.”Henry Miller, “Reflections on Writing”

Men past fifty have a lot to say, or at least we have a lot on our minds. Stories, opinions, half-finished thoughts from the drive home. But sometimes there’s just nowhere to say it, or anyone to say it to.

Well, here’s a place, so if you’re interested, join us.

Who is this for

It’s for me, mostly. But it’s better with company.

It is for men who still read the whole article. The job is fine, or finished, or somewhere in between, and the children, if there are children, no longer need rides. Somewhere around fifty a thing shifted, and no one announced it. The house got quieter. The game on television started to run longer than it used to. Nothing is wrong, exactly. You would just like a few people to talk it over with.

You do not have to call yourself a writer. If you keep a journal in a drawer, or began a novel in 1994 and still think about chapter three, or write excellent emails that no one has ever thanked you for, you are more than qualified.

The evening

The shape of an evening.

7:00 to 9:00About 8 to 10 eager “dudes”
7:00

A reading

Something short, read out loud: an essay, a story, a poem. Men and women, living and dead.

7:20

A conversation

What did it stir up? We talk it through and let the talk wander where it wants. Last week’s game may come up. So may your father.

8:00

A writing prompt

Fifteen minutes to get the pen moving. BYOJ: Bring Your Own Journal. Some nights it’s the Vent. Other nights it’s a memory, a letter, or a lie you told well in 1983.

8:15

Reading aloud

Anyone who wants to reads what he wrote. Rough is fine, and usually better. Then we talk until nine.

A little history

The Vent

Men have been writing to let off steam for a long time. Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire and still kept a private notebook, much of it written on campaign, mostly telling himself to calm down. Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on one long roll of paper in about three weeks. Stephen King threw the first pages of Carrie in the trash, and his wife fished them out. King’s rule in On Writing is “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” That’s our evening. You write with the door closed. Reading it out loud, if you feel like it, is opening the door.

And when a class of high school students wrote to Kurt Vonnegut in 2006, he gave them homework: write a poem, show it to nobody, tear it up, and throw the pieces away. The point of practicing any art, he told them, was to make your soul grow. Fifteen minutes on a Tuesday counts.

Some possible Vents

  • The worst job you ever had.
  • A letter you’ll never send.
  • Ten things you’re quietly proud of.
  • The place you lived at twenty.
  • An argument you’d like a do-over on.
  • A life story you’d make up for a stranger at a bar.

The reading

Here’s a sample season, based on some things I’ve read.

Ten short pieces to give you the idea. We’ll pick our own as we go, and anyone can bring something he loves. Some of these are funny. A couple will get you a little. All of them can be read in one sitting, so nobody has homework.

01

Fathers

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin’s father died in the summer of 1943, the same week riots broke out in Harlem. He writes about both, and about what his father left him.

02

Getting older

Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

Ephron on getting older and hating her neck. Very funny, and more honest than it lets on.

03

Work

Studs Terkel, from Working

Ordinary working people talk about their jobs. Some love the work and some can’t stand it.

04

Self-respect

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

A short essay on what it means to respect yourself. Didion says it starts with taking responsibility for your own life.

See the whole season
05

Grief

Raymond Carver, A Small, Good Thing

A boy is hit by a car on his birthday. His parents wait at the hospital, and a lonely baker ends up feeding them.

06

Attention

Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels

Dillard locks eyes with a weasel in the woods and comes away thinking about how to live.

07

Marriage

John Updike, Separating

A father has to tell his kids that he and their mother are splitting up. A great story about marriage.

08

Memory

Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory

Morrison on how she turns memory into fiction, and why she trusts it.

09

Delight

Ross Gay, from The Book of Delights

A poet writes a short essay about something that delighted him, every day for a year. Most are a page or two.

10

Joy

Zadie Smith, Joy

Smith on the difference between pleasure and joy. She thinks joy is rarer and harder to come by.

Billy Treger, organizer of Wiser Writers

The organizer

Pulling the chairs together.

My mother taught high school English for thirty years. As far as I could tell, her work was a long and patient campaign to convince ninth through twelfth graders that what they had to say was worth saying, and some of it rubbed off. I majored in English literature at the University of Michigan, and one summer I went to its New England Literature Program on the shores of Alton Bay, New Hampshire. The only requirement was to keep a journal. Between hikes and getting lost in the woods, we read Thoreau and Emerson, Loren Eiseley and Emily Dickinson, and wrote about all of it every day. I remember the relief of it, getting my thoughts down on paper. I have kept a journal ever since, some years better than others.

I have spent most of my working life as a writer and editor. I was a high school extrovert who turned a little introverted, and I still call a few close friends from school. What I have missed is a table, a regular night with men who like to think out loud and try something new. So I am setting one. I will bring the first piece of writing. You bring whatever is on your mind.

Billy

The research

A little science.

I’ve never been a guy with a poker night or a football-watching gang. I’ve kept a few close one-to-one friendships from high school and college. But I’ve done some reading on men and aging, and the news is that a lot of us are bad at keeping friends.

In 1990, 3 percent of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021 it was 15 percent.1 The usual explanation is that our friends came with our jobs, and then the job ended, or moved to the kitchen table during COVID, or, in my case, to the basement. Scrolling and scrolling. Nobody decided this. It crept up, like reading glasses. Sound familiar?

The remedy is cheap. A review of 148 studies found that people with strong social ties live measurably longer, an effect researchers compare to quitting smoking, and it’s a lot more fun than quitting smoking.2 A Harvard study that has followed a group of men since 1938 came to the same conclusion: the men who stayed close to other people were the healthier, happier ones, and it counted for more as they got older.3

As for the writing: in 1986 the psychologist James Pennebaker had people write about something hard for fifteen minutes a day, four days in a row. For months afterward they went to the doctor less.4 When the early studies were pooled, men seemed to get more out of it than women, maybe because we had more stored up.5,6 Hell, fifteen minutes is less time than it takes me to find parking on my street in DC.

The fine print: older American men are no lonelier than men in other wealthy countries,7 and the writing studies come out stronger in some places than others,8 so take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ll just say that a pen has kept my temper in check for nearly forty years, and a good story and a table of curious gents beats most of what’s on TV.

The tradition

Others got here first.

None of this is new, which is part of what I like about it. People have been writing their way through hard stretches for as long as there’s been paper. A few of the writers and researchers I’ve learned from:

1973

Peter Elbow

Writing Without Teachers

He made freewriting popular: write for ten minutes without stopping, and don’t judge it. He also believed in writers reading their work out loud to each other.

1975

Ira Progoff

At a Journal Workshop

A psychologist who ran journal workshops. He found people wrote more honestly about their lives when they were in a room with others doing the same.

1986

Natalie Goldberg

Writing Down the Bones

Writing as a daily practice, influenced by Zen. Her main advice is to keep your hand moving and not stop to edit.

1990

James Pennebaker

Opening Up

The psychologist behind the writing studies in the research section. A lot of what we do in the Vent comes from his work.

More from the shelf

1992

Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way

Known for Morning Pages: three handwritten pages every morning, just for yourself. The idea is to clear your head before you try to write anything real.

1999

Louise DeSalvo

Writing as a Way of Healing

A Virginia Woolf scholar who took Pennebaker’s research and applied it to writers. Her advice is to write down what happened and how you felt about it, and keep at it.

2005

James Hollis

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

A Jungian analyst who writes about midlife, when the old roles fall away and you start asking what the rest of your life is for. In Under Saturn’s Shadow he wrote about the hurts men carry and rarely talk about.

2017

Mark Matousek

Writing to Awaken

He believes telling the truth about your life can change it, and he pushes writers to go after the things they’d rather not look at.

Join

Pull up a chair.

The first group is forming in the Baltimore/DC corridor. There are no forms and no mailing list. Send me a note and I’ll write back myself, with a date and a place once we have them.

Outside the area? Write anyway. If enough of you do, we’ll start a virtual group.

Write to Billy

william.treger@gmail.com

Let me know which describes you best

  • You’d like a seat at the table.
  • You’re writing for a husband, father, or friend.
  • You’d like to bring a friend.
  • You’d like to sit in once before deciding.
Sources
  1. Cox, D. A. (2021). The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. Survey Center on American Life, American Perspectives Survey. Read it
  2. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review. PLoS Medicine. Read it
  3. Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. See also the Harvard Gazette, “Good genes are nice, but joy is better” (2017). Read it
  4. Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Read it
  5. Smyth, J. M. (1998). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Read it
  6. Lee, Y., Kim, D., & Lim, J.-E. (2023). Do expressive writing interventions have positive effects on Koreans? A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychiatry. Read it
  7. Gallup (2025). Younger Men in the U.S. Among the Loneliest in West. Gallup World Poll, 2023 and 2024 data. Read it
  8. Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. Meads, C., & Nouwen, A. (2005). Does emotional disclosure have any effects? A systematic review. Read it
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