Just over a year ago, three English Department professors—fiction writer Michael Don, fiction writer and essayist Billy Howell and poet and essayist Liz Paul—joined local poet Erika Ostergaard to launch a new literary series in downtown Fairfax. Fox City Lit hosts quarterly readings as well as weekly writing get-togethers—both celebrating and encouraging literary talent from the local area and throughout the DMV region.
The four founders collectively fielded some questions about their goals, their approach, and their successes. Our exchange is below, and do check out the Fox City Lit website for more information and to keep up with upcoming events. You can also find bios for each on their "Our Team" page.
What was the genesis for Fox City Lit? When did you first come up with this idea and what were any challenges in getting started?
We’re all residents of Fairfax City and we have a special fondness for our little downtown. We had enjoyed going to various reading series in D.C., which we still enjoy attending, and these readings had given us inspiration to start something locally in Fairfax City with the goal to add to the vibrant DMV literary scene and offer the George Mason community something nearby and out of the institutional context. Over the course of a year or so of impromptu conversations on car rides back from D.C. literary events, we finally took the plunge and locked down a venue and invited some DMV writers out to Fairfax. And thus we launched Fox City in Summer 2024 not knowing if five or forty-five people would show up.
It turned out to be the latter, which included neighbors, friends, family, writers from all around the DMV, George Mason faculty and MFA candidates, and the mayor of Fairfax City. We’ve now been hosting quarterly readings since July 2024 at Old Firestation #3 and more recently at Kelly’s Oyster House. From the beginning, we envisioned a series that was casual, fun, and inviting to writers, nonwriters, Mason students, and the Fairfax community more broadly.
The biggest challenge was probably taking the initial plunge and the uncertainty of whether or not our idea would work. Once you start inviting writers out to read their work, you feel a responsibility to provide an attentive audience and space conducive to reading. Now that we’re more established it feels like the series more or less runs itself.
How do you program the readings—with a purposeful mix of genres? a mix of established and emerging writers?
There’s only a little method to our madness though it’s important to us to hear from readers with a range of experience, from emerging to more established, at each reading. We also try to feature a mix of genres each time–poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We invite at least one Mason MFA candidate to read, and we have been featuring one local writer who has recently launched a book. But at the end of the day, we’re not super uptight about striving to hit a perfect balance for any given reading.
In addition to the Reading Series, Fox City Lit also hosts Wednesday evening writing groups at Commonwealth Brewing Company. What’s the shape of these get-togethers, and how has turn-out been? How do you see these gatherings as core to your mission?
Really we just want to carve out consistent spaces for creativity. Our weekly writing groups are very flexible. We do our best to shape each meeting to the needs of the writers who join us that week. We have meetings with generative writing prompts to help folks who are blocked, meetings where we share insights into publishing and compile submission deadlines, meetings where we talk through ideas for bigger projects. We’ve had some meetings where we read aloud poems or bits of prose that aren’t quite clicking and offer each other feedback. Often, we just write in silence for a couple hours. The effect of this—psychologists call it “body doubling”—can be surprisingly therapeutic. The leap of trust it takes to sit among other writers scribbling away can really focus you and help you trust your own scribblings. Maybe in the future we’ll impose more structure on the workshops, but for the moment, the unpredictability is part of the fun. While we aren’t filling stadiums, we have both regulars and newcomers every week. We’ve been writing Wednesday nights at Commonwealth for ages. But knowing how tight the average student budget can be, we’ve started also hosting a Tuesday workshop at Old Firestation #3 to take advantage of happy hour specials that budding younger authors at Mason might find more inviting.
So far we’ve mentioned Old Firestation #3, Kelly’s Oyster House, and Commonwealth Brewing Company—some nice shout-outs! How have local businesses welcomed and supported Fox City Lit?
We’ve been fortunate that so many local business leaders have embraced Fox City. Back before Fox City had a name, we floated the idea to some local restaurateurs and were met with lots of enthusiasm. With Mason right next door, Fairfax City is poised to host a generation of literary voices, primed to embrace a culture of engaged intellectuals and creatives. Josh Alexander of Mackenzie’s Tunes & Tonics and Dominic Keane of Auld Shebeen gave us encouraging feedback, and Tony Hassan worked with us to arrange our first readings in the (I jokingly want to say secret or covert) upstairs space at Old Firestation #3. That venue felt like a disco speakeasy in the best way. It gave us the physical space to launch our first Fox City events. As we’ve expanded our crowd size a bit, and for improved accessibility, we’ve held our recent readings at Kelly’s Oyster House. Bill Hamrock has been a pleasure to work with, and we look forward to hosting our next reading at Kelly’s on October 18th.
Speaking of community… As you point out on the website, “Northern Virginia is a hotbed of bright and brilliant literary talent with neither gyre nor centre.” While we wouldn’t want to argue with that last sentiment (or with any Yeats allusion), it’s worth pointing out that Mason’s English Department boasts three of the founders of Fox City Lit—and many of the readers in the series have had Mason connections too. How does the department or the university generally help serve the series—and how do you hope Fox City Lit might help the university?
Permit an anecdote: In his enthusiasm for Fairfax City after moving from D.C., our co-founder Billy surveyed Nextdoor to understand why he wasn’t seeing more college kids downtown. After all, he could walk to class from De Clieu. Shouldn’t the reverse be true? After sifting through many Nextdoor conspiracy theorists and people angry about traffic or real-estate taxes, he discovered that there have only ever been limited attempts at mutual outreach. Locals sometimes think of Mason as a commuter school just outside town that has little to do with them. Mason students sometimes think downtown Fairfax is too far away. We want to change that perception. It’s relevant here to mention that prior to arriving in the DMV, Michael and Billy both had recently lived in (and hosted readings in) those fabled midwestern college towns where every coffee shop, Subway, taco truck, and dive bar is packed with college students—engaged critical thinkers debating politics, talking marketing strategy, drafting novels, rehearsing plays, debugging code. Similarly, Erika spent her college days slinging matcha at Shepherd among liberal arts majors expressing themselves via comic strips and photography and even cake decorating. There’s a lot of value in that kind of in-person creative engagement.
We’re excited to see the streets of downtown Fairfax peppered with college kids. We’re excited to see events like Ornery’s Trivia Night or Bunnyman’s Sing-O advertise on campus. Being a college student involves learning to be part of a society—and that starts locally. We want Fox City to be an avenue through which people at Mason can discover Fairfax City and vice versa.
What’s next on the calendar?
Our next reading will be October 18th at Kelly’s Oyster House from 2pm-4pm. We will feature readings from Greg Marak, Candice Wiswell, George Mason MFA student Michaela Godding and professor Sally Keith, and Shelagh Powers Johnson, whose debut story collection just came out in August. You can find all the details on our website: foxcitylit.com.
We’re currently working on the lineup for our winter reading, which will take place the last weekend of January. We will also be co-hosting offsite readings at the 2026 AWP Conference in Baltimore. We’ll post details about these events on our website once they’re locked down. And we’re keeping up our usual weekly workshops—Tuesdays from 4pm-6pm at Old Firestation #3 and Wednesdays from 6pm-8pm at Commonwealth Brewing.
October 14, 2025