Doug Jones wants to help writers connect with his Opening Movements workshop

Brooklyn-born novelist Doug Jones found himself lonely for other writers after he moved to Atlanta from New York City in 2017. “In New York, you sit on your stoop, you talk to your neighbor,” he says, explaining, “before I even got into my house, I had 45 minutes’ worth of conversation [because] the neighbors were out.” 

“It’s been a little challenging because Atlanta is car-oriented, and so much of what we do as writers is interact with people.” In New York, he says, “you’re either taking a train or you’re walking everywhere. And that is another way we interact with people. That kind of energy fuels the creative mind.”

Community is a major theme in Jones’ debut novel, The Fantasies of Future Things, which was released to great fanfare in April of this year. The book follows a pair of queer Black men searching for intimacy and connection amid the gentrification, homophobia and restrictive masculinity of the mid-1990s. The Atlanta Voice called the novel “a love story to and about the Black LGBTQ+ community.” Jones told the newspaper that he hopes readers finish the novel with a new appreciation for “the love that we need to have for one another.”

Still, that sense of a tight-knit literary community has been slow coming in Atlanta, where writers often feel splintered and disconnected, despite the city’s rich literary legacy. “I have friends who are writers that I talk to all the time, but I’m not connected to a writing community in Atlanta,” Jones says. “That’s something that I felt particularly over this last year with the book coming out.”

So Jones jumped at the opportunity when Lostintheletters founder and Director Scott Daughtridge DeMer contacted him about participating in this year’s Letters Festival, a series of readings, talks and workshops that aim to provide creative writing education to the community. “I was like, ‘Absolutely, I’d love to do that,’” he says, adding that he has been enjoying the organization’s newly opened writing studio in Candler Park.

Once he agreed to lead a workshop during the Festival, Jones had to figure out his angle. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Now I have to teach this craft class,’” he laughs. Inspiration struck as he was rereading the opening of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which he says is “so chaotic, but it’s so symphonic.”

“The way that the novel gets started,” he says, “is the reader’s entry into the rest of the world that you’ve created. And I wanted to talk about that.” Jones expects to discuss the craft and techniques of opening a novel, and he hopes that attendees will come prepared not only to share their work but to communicate with each other as artists.

“In the environment that Lostintheletters is setting up, you have people who are dedicating themselves to writing, and they’re looking for just a little bit of guidance and a little bit of interaction.” He adds that the opportunity to connect “might even be a bigger thing than just doing the writing itself, although the writing is huge. But really participating in those kinds of settings — yeah, I think that would be really, really great.”

Where & When: 

The 2025 Letters Festival is November 14 and November 15 at the Goat Farm, 1200 Foster St. NW. All events are ticketed on a sliding scale between $10 and $50. The Opening Movements fiction workshop with Doug Jones will be held November 15 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. 

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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.