Joy Deva Baglio can’t pinpoint the moment she decided to be a writer. The widely published author and founder of the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop grew up with a library of children’s books and fairy tales, and one day, she needed to tell a story. It was only natural; the words, as vital as breath, entered her mind so they could be expressed. Before she could write, she dictated these stories — because once there was one, there was always another — to her mother, who scribbled them onto the page with an urgency worthy of her burgeoning creativity. While an elementary school student at the Aurora Waldorf School in Buffalo, New York, Baglio wrote and illustrated her own stories, including one told from the perspective of her cockatiel. In high school, she penned a fantasy novel, “The Curse of the Dragon Queen,” complete with a meticulously drawn map that rivaled Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
For Baglio, world-building wasn’t confined to the page. The Northampton-based Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop (PVWW), a literary arts organization that celebrates its 10-year anniversary on Friday, is a carefully curated network of thousands of creatives that began in her imagination.
After attending Bard College, Baglio received her master of fine arts in creative writing at The New School. She met her partner, Eric Fernandez, in the Empire State, but on the weekends they found themselves fleeing the city to hike outside of it. It wasn’t long before they discovered western Massachusetts, moving to Northampton in 2015.
The view felt uniquely expansive. “There was something about leaving New York that opened up my sense of possibility of what I could do outside of the massive city, where you are just a very small thing,” Baglio said. “Being in this place at that time allowed me to dream big about what I really wanted to do.”
Her dream became clear the following summer, after she attended the Tin House Summer Workshop at Reed College, now called the McCormack Writing Center, where she was immersed in a community focused not just on writing, but on writing well.
“I wanted to create something that felt equally energized and craft-centered,” she said.
In the fall of 2016, the sprawling organization, which now reaches writers on every continent, started as a nine-person workshop taught by Baglio at the now-closed Commons Coworking in Williamsburg. She advertised the event by putting up flyers “the old-fashioned way,” tacking them to coffee shop bulletin boards where patrons could tear off tiny tabs featuring PVWW’s website.
“It was just to feel out if people wanted to come and talk about craft, and it seemed like they did,” she said.
When PVWW leveled up to eight-week workshops the following spring, one of its first attendees was Emily Everett, whose debut novel, “All That Life Can Afford,” was selected by Reese Witherspoon as a Reese’s Book Club pick in April 2025. The organization has since helped many authors on their path to publication.
But the pandemic forced Baglio to pivot. She again tested the waters, approaching virtual classes as a way to offer affordable community writing when the world needed a morale boost. It was so successful that the organization went completely virtual, offering multiple day- and week-long workshops — and even a 10-month manuscript program for those working on a book-length project — taught by many educators in multiple genres. To stay connected to the loyal local community, PVWW still offers in-person readings and gatherings every year at institutions like the Florence Civic Center and Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton.
On Friday, Oct. 9, PVWW will hold an all-day writers’ retreat at the Florence Civic Center, followed by an evening reading and celebration of its 10-year anniversary. The retreat, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., will be structured around dedicated writing time in indoor and outdoor spaces. The reading, from 6:30 to 9 p.m., will feature live music, refreshments, and readings by several instructors and local authors like Duncan Birmingham, Mira Bartok, Peter Medeiros and Gail Thomas.
“It feels really special that it has not only sustained itself, but that it’s grown and that it’s affected as many people as it has,” said Baglio of the organization. “Like I was just wondering if my little workshop would run.”
Her own path as a writer has influenced PVWW’s reach. In 2019, while on a residency fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, Baglio met a writer from Nigeria named Uchenna Awoke.
When she learned that he and his family were facing violence in their home country, Baglio started “Writers Without Borders,” raising nearly $7,000 through PVWW and hosting a remote reading with Awoke in 2021. He has since published two novels and is now enrolled at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Baglio, who has been published in literary magazines including “Ploughshares” and “The Iowa Review,” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the former for her short story “Frog Heart.” Her speculative fiction is infused with what she calls “a complex sense of hopefulness.”
In “We Are Sorry For Your Suffering,” published last year in “One Story,” she explores a post-apocalyptic world through the lens of AI, which, after destroying humanity, finds one remaining child who they raise as their own. The piece is a love letter of sorts to the girl, who is coming of age and wants to understand her home through her own eyes:
What can we tell you of raising a child? It was not a desire we could have understood before we found you, yet if we have learned anything in our evolution it is that to exist is to plan for the unexpected, that what is new or unfamiliar should not be feared, that the adaptable alone survive, and that each instance of survival has goodness in it.
As Baglio explains in an interview with the literary magazine, “I’m interested in longing, striving, and determination that defies what’s possible, that turns into its own kind of magic.”
She recognizes that this is a complicated time for AI, when there is legitimate fear around its potential dangers. But the story is deeply moving and even hopeful. Also nominated for a Pushcart Prize, it will be included in the “Pushcart Prize LI: Best of the Small Presses” at the end of this year.
In another story that explores the impact of technology, “They Could Have Been Yours,” a young female protagonist discovers former lovers’ engagement announcements on “the Site,” and then, after cyberstalking their soon-to-be married fiancées, finds a magic ring that will allow her to plunge more deeply into the women’s lives:
There’s something about the moment when the ring slides onto my finger, the coldness and tightness of it — snug and perfectly fitted like a glove but without any warmth — the darkness that rushes down around me like a fallen curtain so that I’m now distinctly nowhere, that lets me know I have crossed a line, stumbled upon a new kind of uncanny.
By the end of the story, the woman is granted freedom.
The author is at work on two novels, including one based on the characters in “How to Survive on Land,” a short story about two half-mermaid sisters investigating the mystery of their missing siren mother.
In her free time, Baglio has played the bagpipes for the past decade, an activity she believes dovetails with writing. “I think the bagpipes really echo something deep and mysterious about how the universe works, which is also what writing does,” she said. To play, a musician starts with a flute-like instrument called a chanter, which plays nine notes from Low G to High A. When they are ready for a set of pipes, two of the drones, or long pipes, play one note below A, and a third drone plays an octave below that. Together, “it’s all playing this steady, droning sound, and that to me represents a cosmic background, like something repetitious and ongoing about existence,” explained Baglio. “And then you have the melody being played on this chanter, like this fluttering dance of life,” a story needing to be told.
Learn more about PVWW and its upcoming events at pioneervalleywriters.org. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.