Within the past two months, we've welcomed forty new members to the SWG site, as well as many more to our Discord. As we just turned twenty years old, this makes it a good time to introduce ourselves to our newcomers and, for those of you who have been around longer but maybe aren't entirely sure what we're about or how you fit in, to run down the many ways you can participate in the SWG.

The Silmarillion Writers' Guild was founded in March 2005 and opened its doors in July 2005 on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. We were originally a community for sharing and discussing fanworks, but I (Dawn) happened to mention in my very first post to that community about the future possibility of building an archive, and we did. In June 2007, our eFiction-powered archive opened for the first fanworks. At the time, there were dozens of Tolkien fanworks archives, but we were the only one that focused solely on The Silmarillion.

Today, twenty years later, we are still centered on that website and archive (now Drupal-powered), which contains more than 6,000 fanworks of all types, from fiction to playlists and art to essays. If you create fanworks, we welcome you to archive your new and past Silmarillion-based fanworks with us. (Once you post five fanworks or 10,000 words, you will gain posting access to the Beyond the Silmarillion section and can archive anything Tolkien-related with us.) Use the My Account dropdown to post a fanwork or access things like your fanworks list, favorite, and comments. If you'd like to check out eighteen years of fanworks but don't know where to start (understandable!), Find a Fanwork can help you locate fanworks about characters, relationships, and genres you enjoy while avoiding what you don't. We hope that if you find something you love, that you will let the creator know!

The archive is the backbone of the SWG, but our community and its discussions are its heart. The original space where we socialized with each other, Yahoo! Groups, shut its doors some time ago. Our social space is now located on Discord, and if you want to talk Tolkien and get to know your fellow SWG members better, we welcome you to join us there.

The SWG has always sought to blend fanworks with research and scholarship on Tolkien, written by and for fans of his work. The Silmarillion is an immensely complicated work, and we want anyone who wants to build castles in our sandbox to feel empowered with the resources to do so, even if they are new to The Silmarillion. Our Reference Library contains more than 300 reference works written by SWG members about Tolkien studies and adjacent disciplines, aimed at an audience of fanworks creators. If you love to research and write meta or scholarship, we are always looking for new contributions. We welcome newsletter articles and are revamping our peer-review process for the Reference Library post-Mereth Aderthad.

Fanworks creators looking for regular inspiration should check our our monthly challenges, which vary in format from month to month. If our challenge isn't doing it for you this month, we also cross-post event announcements from around the Tolkien fandom in our Around the World and Web section. We also hold group events on our Discord server, including monthly instadrabbling sessions on the first of each month. You can see any upcoming events we are hosting under SWG News.

All of this comes with a culture that values inclusivity and openmindedness. We've been around a while. We've seen a Tolkien fandom where gatekeeping was normal and some genres and topics of fanworks received hostility, if they were permitted at all. We didn't set out to be fandom revolutionaries and change the old order, but we did find that our strength wasn't in the quality of our fanworks or our knowledge of Tolkien trivia but in the diversity of perspectives our members brought to discussions and to their fanworks. If you're new, we welcome you to share your own perspective on Tolkien with us, and if you've been with us a while, we hope you will continue doing so.

If you have questions or need assistance from our moderators, you can always reply to these newsletters or email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.