The 5am Writers Club
Photo M. Revenaugh
By Mickey Revenaugh, written September 2025
Every morning, seven days a week, 365 days a year, you will find me upright before sunrise, coffee in hand and laptop open. I post a proof of life on all the socials, then dig into whatever project is most bedeviling me at the moment. Some days the words rattle out like marbles from a tipped tin, other days are type-two-delete-one. But by the time the rest of the world wakes up, I’ve staked my claim. I am a writer because I belong to the 5am Writers Club.
That might sound backward. Don’t you have to be a writer first, before you get to join any club with “writers” in its name?
I’m here to argue the opposite. Hear me out.
Most of the identities I hold proudly are self-ascribed. While there’s objective evidence that I get all raucous over the lives of women, and that I prefer sidewalks to dirt, and that I get hooked on things that might kill me, no one else bestowed on me the title of feminist city slicker in recovery. That was all my doing.
Same thing with being a writer.
Of course, as the kids say, you have to put in the work.
Me, I figure I’ve composed millions of words over my long lifetime. There were the middle school crush and apocalypse poems, a few dozen of which I remember assembling into a manuscript and sending off to a New York City publisher by mail, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, just like my writer father did; just like him, I welcomed my book back a month later with a nice noncommittal note to keep at it. I wrote multiple stories per issue for the high school newspaper I edited, and the upstate alternative newspaper I edited, and the collection of teacher magazines I edited. I produced a constant flow of “no more than 20 pages” pieces for writers group workshop critique and then 20 times that for my MFA thesis. I’ve had some stuff published along the way and lots of stuff not. Right now, I’m in the final editing stages for a nonfiction book, one that takes me back to my journalism roots but also lets me put a creative riff on things like the hairstyles at a homeschool conference and the crackle of tweens putting on a 12-kid prom.
I’ve put in the words.
But it’s the 5am club that has me waking up every day thinking I am a writer.
Most folks who do this predawn writing routine do so because they have day jobs, or kids and day jobs, or cats and kids and day jobs: you write before the alarm rings for your other obligations (though the cats apparently serve as their own furry clocks). But I didn’t join the 5am writers club until the day after I retired from my day job, which did get me in the habit of wee-hours working by giving me a U.K.-based team and boss to manage. Petless and childfree, I shot awake on that dark December morning in 2022, tiptoed into my newly liberated home office, and typed in the hashtag that I’d heard about from grad school compatriots and writing group friends.
#5amwritersclub
This was on Twitter back when Twitter was still called Twitter and was only 90% hellscape. What came up on my screen when I searched on the hashtag was evidence of globally distributed secret cells of creatives sheltering in place, sending bite-sized dispatches into the darkness. Poets and romance novelists and sci-fi writers and memorists, lit fic purists and multigenre maximalists, the semifamous and the not-yet-published, all raising a hand to say, “I’m here.” Some would add #amwriting, others would fret about feeling blocked. Some were there to celebrate the #writingcommunity and others indulged in #shamelessselfpromotion. The variety was astounding, clamorous yet soundless beyond the wave of my own breathing, like dancing in the middle of a silent rave where everyone’s wearing message tees.
I lurked for a bit, trying to intuit the rules. What soon became clear is that the only rule of #5amwritersclub is that, other than no trolling (everyone is very, very kind), there are no rules.
You post your thing, you add your hashtag, you heart some stuff, and you get on with it.
Most importantly, no one questioned my right to be in the club. It was all just thumbs-up and the occasional personal “Hello” after a few weeks. (And a little barrage of DMs from people wanting to help with marketing or sell me crypto, but I ignored those.)
I soon developed my own signature kind of post: a photo of some odd thing I saw in my wanderings around Brooklyn and elsewhere—a “random click”—posted as a writing self-prompt. For each picture, I would write a few hundred words, just locally on my laptop, not for sharing quite yet. (Others were more forthcoming, including someone writing a memoir in daily tweets, all lowercase with lots of ellipses, and the poet who posted a new haiku every day. I could only dream of being that bold, or that productive.)
Over that first year of 5ams, I put together a whole novella in flash—who knew there was such a thing?—with a photo and a chunk of text on each page, telling the warped story of a young art school dropout squatting in an abandoned cement factory in the Hudson Valley. She appeared to me before daybreak every morning, and I channeled her. Someday she may see print.
Along the way I “met” writers from all over the world: because it’s always 5am somewhere, their posts might come in hours before mine or hours afterward, but we were all in the same club. Some folks gathered for a virtual donut party on Fridays while others just raised their tea mugs in virtual toasts. There were many self-made cover reveals and pictures from book fairs and laments about manuscripts started but never finished. Some people disappeared for social media fasts while others went from posting monthly to popping up hourly. A stalwart speculative fiction writer from Florida wrote one morning about the scream of an oncoming hurricane—and then fell silent for a week. We all barraged him with relieved greetings when he returned, hawking his dystopian dolphin tales from another, drier location.
Around the 18-month mark, I discovered that my next-door neighbor, a much-published writer of edgy fiction, was hosting the occasional two-week sprint she called the Ungodly Hour Writing Club. Each weekday morning for a fortnight, you’d log into Zoom at 5:30 a.m. with camera and mic off and just write together in companionable silent witness. Sara would occasionally post an inspirational quote in the chat, and some try-hards like me would wish everyone a good day at 6:30 a.m. sign-off time, but that was it. Your Zoom profile pic, name, and pronouns were your living hashtag. Another Ungodly sprint is starting this week as I write this. I’ll check in with my 5am compatriots on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads (but not Twitter/X, not anymore), then roll right into Zoom. Sara’s keeping sessions open till 7:00 a.m. this time. We’re all very grateful.
Since mid 2024, my predawn writing sessions have been focused on this real-life book I’m writing about various forms of unconventional education American families have been flocking to since the pandemic: multiple flavors of homeschooling, microschools, roadschooling, virtual schooling, and the like. I have an agent and an editor and a university press publisher, and deadlines both self-imposed and official. I’ve been using my photo prompts as “WIP warmups” to ease into the vast wordy morasse of my manuscript. I do work on this project at all hours of the day and night, but predawn sets the tone. I’m finally heading into what I hope will be final revisions before the beast goes into production and then emerges in print in 2026.
I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges from the darkness then at the #5amwritersclub.
Mickey Revenaugh (she/her) is a nonfiction/fiction writer who is also cofounder of Connections Academy, a global network of virtual K–12 schools. Her various obsessions meld in School’s Out, forthcoming in 2026 from Johns Hopkins University Press. Mickey’s shorter work has appeared in Vice, Catapult, Chautauqua, and many others. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, an MBA from New York University, and a BA in American studies from Yale University, but she may be proudest of serving as board president for Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her at @mickeyrevenaugh on social media or mickeyrevenaugh.com on the web.
*****
Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we BLAZE a path for women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook or Instagram, or subscribing to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.