Freehand exists to build community, foster creative growth, and create opportunities for writers of all genres and experience levels.
What began as a monthly reading series has grown into a broader initiative: a creative writing collective that facilitates connection, collaboration, education, and artistic development.
Through events, workshops, writing groups, retreats, publications, and partnerships, we help writers identify the role they want writing to play in their lives and provide meaningful opportunities to make that happen.
Freehand Writing Collective
Freehand began with two friends yearning for the same thing: a place for writers of all kinds to share their work, develop their craft, and find community in the process.
Calen and Justin are both Nashville-based creatives—one a writer and singer, the other a writer, actor, and musician—who met through their work in learning and development. Much of their early conversations centered around finding a space where writing could be messy, varied, unfinished, shared, and celebrated.
There were certainly places to do all of that in a beautifully creative city like Nashville, but much of it felt disjointed. You went to one place to perform, another to develop your craft, and another to meet and learn from people working in the industry. The different pieces of a thriving creative writing community were there, but there was no place for them to consistently come together.
So, they built one.
Our Story.
Freehand’s namesake is one from Justin’s childhood. For as long as he can remember, his mother kept notebooks that she used for everything: ideas, lists, sketches, thoughts, life. Some of Justin’s earliest memories are of decorating their covers together and wrapping them in plastic to keep them protected. In those notebooks, he learned early on that ideas—and the words we use to hold them—were precious things worth taking care of.
She called them Freehand.
Eventually, those notebooks became theirs—shared between Justin, his mother, and his younger sister. Their pages became places to think freely, leave notes and stories for one another to find, and remind each other that there was always room for another thought. Justin still has dozens of them.
Freehand is named after those notebooks and for the belief they carried: that not everything needs to know what it will become before it deserves a page.
Today, the Freehand Writing Collective is that page for a growing community of writers.