In the depths of the 2008-09 financial crisis, novelist Judith Lindbergh never thought she’d become an entrepreneur.
But her “side hustle” of running a writers’ workshop for the South Orange-Maplewood Adult School — and her experience as a mom — was showing her that there was a lot of untapped potential for writing classes and workshops for all ages in the two towns and the surrounding area.
Fast forward to 2025 and Lindbergh, founder and director of The Writers Circle, has been running and expanding her business for 15 years. “Our anniversary was January 19,” she told Village Green.
The business includes in-person and virtual writers’ classes for all ages. There are workshops for kids, WordSMASH summer mini-camps for grades 3-7, Summer Creative Writing Intensives for grades 8-12 at Drew University, and scads and scads of programs for adults including Yoga for Writers, Memoir Writing, Mystery Writers Circle, Creating Kid Lit, Beginning Your Novel, and more.
Lindbergh and her staff of published authors lead circles, workshops and classes, meeting in numerous locations in towns across north and central New Jersey — as well as virtually — attracting aspiring writers near and far.
“I was teaching at a South Orange-Maplewood Adult School, and I really thought that would be it as I finished my next novel,” said Lindbergh. She is the author of two immersive and absorbing historical fiction novels: The Thrall’s Tale and Akmaral.
“Things were not going quite as quickly as I’d expected,” said Lindbergh. At one meeting in her home, writers were discussing how they were going to make a living, “And people were talking about hyperlocal news. And I thought to myself, ‘Hyperlocal? I can do creative writing hyperlocally!’”
Lindbergh with a writers group from SOMAS.
“My goal was simply to create a community and teach a couple of classes at the beginning,” said Lindbergh. “Something that would be a part of our towns for the writers that I knew, and a way to meet new writers. We have so many creative people in South Orange and Maplewood—and this whole region—but particularly in our towns.”
She started with children’s classes.
“All the parents were telling me that their kids struggled with writing. That when they were little, they loved making up stories. … but then the minute the kids got into school and had to follow the rubric, the love died.”
Lindbergh’s acting background kicked in.
“A lot of my personal technique in my own writing is to become the characters. So I got a bunch of kids in a room and started pretending that we were animals. We’d crawl around on the floor or do whatever animals do. … And then I would say, ‘Don’t tell us what kind of animal you are. Write about it.’ And they wrote from the points of view of being those animals. They had so much fun. And the main objective with those classes, and it continues to this day, is that I want the kids to love to create.”
2024 Story Magic at SOPAC. The Writers Circle.
About that rubric: Lindbergh tells the kids that “they need to learn those skills. And I want them to understand that they have to follow those requirements for school. But at The Writers Circle, it’s fun and creative and you can do anything, and you can be anything.”
A year later, her eventual business partner and The Writers Circle’s co-director Michelle Cameron encouraged Lindbergh to expand classes for adults. Soon more local authors joined the teaching staff.
Lindbergh said, “My philosophy was to find local published authors … They’ve gone through the gauntlet of drafting, submission, and acceptance—plus millions of rejections before that acceptance. They understand the process of revision and more revision. I really wanted that kind of expertise in the program. I also wanted these local authors to teach in their own communities. Ideally, everyone would teach in their own town and not have to drive more than a few minutes from their houses.”
The Covid-19 pandemic changed all that.
Lindbergh leads an adult student workshop in 2024.
“On March 12, 2020, I turned the entire Writers Circle virtual in 24 hours. And suddenly people around the country who were looking for community found us. We had students in California, Florida, Maryland, Texas, and Indiana. We had students in Canada. We had students for a while in Europe and in Israel. And one student even joined us from Tasmania.”
“It was very powerful,” said Lindbergh. “I have friends and relationships with students that I’ve never met in real life.”
Summer Creative Writing Intensive at Drew University.
After the pandemic, the challenge has been getting back to real life. “Some people, even if they’re in the local neighborhood, just don’t want to leave their house. So we’ve now got in-person classes for certain segments of the community, and online classes for people near and far. And that includes the kids’ classes. We have one teacher who is so dynamic with the kids that online is super fun, so he teaches entirely online. But we also have in-person kids’ and teen classes like those I teach on Saturdays at SOPAC.”
The in-person element has come back big time post-pandemic.
“We work with schools, libraries, and senior centers,” said Lindbergh. “We have a wonderful relationship, for example, with the Livingston Library which has hired us many times with different workshops and themes. And we customize our programs to suit the different organizations’ needs.”
“In the summer, which is our most insane and wonderful time, we run our Summer Creative Writing Intensive for teens at Drew University. We also run mini-camps — one-week, short-term programs for grades 3-7 for younger kids who want to keep writing and reading during the summer. But the Summer Intensives are the most amazing thing we do. We get 40 kids each week who love to write and who are often outliers in their school communities — because how many kids these days love to write? With us, they find their people. We offer genre workshops every mornings. They pick two of four different options each week, like fiction, poetry, graphic novels, sci-fi, memoir, and more.”
This summer, Lindbergh is leading an eco-fiction workshop “because I love being in the woods.”
SCWI 2013 – TWC’s very first teen Circle.
“Then we do crazy group projects so they’re not sitting at a desk all day. We get them out moving and we have interactive writing projects. And on Wednesdays, we take them out for a group ‘literary adventure.’ Sometimes it’s on campus, taking advantage of Drew’s wonderful campus, but most of the time we go off-site. We have been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellis Island, and this year we’re going to the Morgan Library. Plus, every other year, we head to the Deserted Village in the Watchung Reservation. There we’ve focused on historical fiction,” Lindbergh explains, “but we’ve also had ‘zombies versus vampires’ themes. We’ve written post-apocalyptic stories and the kids are all running around in the woods, creating site-specific writing, and performing skits.”
Lindbergh is proud of all her students.
“We have many really successful students who’ve gone on to publish, get into amazing colleges and MFA programs, start or work for literary magazines and publishing houses, and win literary awards. For the teens alone, there are at least eight national gold medals from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in my cabinet, plus countless ‘gold keys’ that our teens won in regional competitions. And some of our former teen students—now well-published adults—have returned to teach in our programs.”
Find out more about The Writers Circle and its programs for kids and adults at writerscircleworkshops.com. Follow TWC on Instagram @writerscircleworkshops.
