To everything there is a season

Fosterverse Weekly #45

Jul 02, 2025

I’m feeling the cycles of creation at work, sometimes driving production and other times demanding rest. What is right in any given moment is a riddle to be solved.

When we started this

CoAuthored

revival, it was with curiosity for the kind of engagement the

Foster

community might be interested in. Creativity loves an experiment, where possibility entices the exploration of new frontiers.

This was true of our intentions for the revival, but it also captures most closely my experience of Foster as a community. It is a place where people show up to plant seeds they hope will bear fruit, to do the tireless work of tending fertile ground, of people being present to others with witness and solidarity for the trials and tribulations of the labor required in the act of creation.

I have always stood in awe of the ways in which Foster seems to weave a daisy chain of personal relationships from relatively brief online encounters. I have abused the privilege of crying on Zoom more often than I care to admit. But in the course of the nearly three years I’ve spent showing up in various Foster spaces, I’ve been amazed to find what I now consider to be friends. On some level it feels strange to have friends on the internet I’ve never met in real life. But people in this community have been witness to some of my life’s darkest moments, and have also watched me grow my self awareness and expand my consciousness in profound ways.

Ninety days ago, I kicked off this revival with a tongue-in-cheek April Fools Day post about apocalypse because I perceive within the Foster community a deeper awareness than many other places that the world around us is changing in profound ways that humans may or may not be equipped to manage or control. Those who find their way here to stay seem to simultaneously appreciate that while the old world order may be showing signs of wear to the point of breaking, a new way of being is bursting forth from the very spaces we both narrate and inhabit.

I find a deeper consciousness here, but of what exactly?

Foster was originally founded as a technology startup trying to build a Chrome extension that would enable seamless peer editing online, only to be overtaken by the editorial capacity of AI. When the organization pivoted towards creating community around writing as a way to express deeper human truths, it gave up raising venture funding, its growth mandate, and its governance structure. A lot of energy has gone out of Foster’s sails in the three years I’ve been here. And yet people still keep showing up for writing circles because witnessing each other in the process of our individual and collective truth-seeking adds meaning to our individual and collective lives.

write everything down

One of the things that makes Foster truly unique as a community is the way it pulls people together across time and space. I’ve watched members of Foster move all the way across America and halfway around the world and show up in writing circles where participants span ten time zones.

In this Fosterverse revival, Jesse wrote about his train ride across America, the geolocation of stories, and what he learned as a community steward in Brooklyn. Sara wrote about the Zen of writing together and the relationship between writing and recovery. Danver wrote about cunning in an era of chaos, calling in our vocational ancestors, and most recently about her quest for belonging.

Fosterverse Weekly

Where Do I Belong?

Danver Chandler

Jun 10

Dear Writers,

Read full story

I, too, have spent much of my life asking this question, feeling ill suited to the circumstances I find myself in—too opinionated, too outspoken—but here in Foster, amid the check-ins and the writing circles, I have found a sense of belonging I haven’t felt anywhere else. On the one hand, it is strange to feel belonging in a Zoom room. And on the other hand, it seems obvious I would feel at home among a group of people who are reaching inward for self-actualization as they reach outward for connection and deeper consciousness.

Last month, I shared my experience writing ten years of morning pages, and I continue to repeat the same mantra to myself and my peers: write everything down. We will forget who and what we are in this moment in history far faster than anyone would care to admit; and someday, we and others may well hope to remember.

It is so impossibly hard to appreciate the changes happening before us in real time.

Last week in the Foster Writers WhatsApp, a few members of the community entered into a debate about the utility and sentience of AI. It was such a joy to watch people with whom I feel such connection debate whether AI is or isn’t sentient and how it may or may not be serving the long-term (or even short-term) well-being of society. Internet spaces can be ferocious and reactive, but because of the mutual knowing that exists between those who have been witnessing eachothers’ creative process for years, their mutual inquiry felt less like a barb and more like an invitation into a new way of knowing.

We’re letting the revival rest for the summer, while holding space for the possibility we’ll reenact in the fall. If you’re feeling called to share yourself and your writing here in the Fosterverse, let us know in the comments, or in the WhatsApp Writers chat.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll keep showing up for yourselves and for each other, asking life’s frequently unanswered questions, and together, seeking a deeper consciousness of the truth that abounds within us all.