Rules for RWL spaces

Rebel Women Lit is a soft and intimate literary community that is open to anyone interested in challenging the ways we move through the world by exploring great literature. To ensure that we protect our community and build a space of trust, we’ve created community guidelines to help set boundaries for how we engage within our community. These guidelines help us build trust and remain vulnerable as we challenge our ideas.

Be kind and have a Clean-Heart

We must be kind here. You don’t have to be nice, but you must be kind. The world is a cruel place and RWL wants to be an oasis filled with beautiful people who love discussing books... so be kind and we hope you find your kind of people here.

Disavow ideas of mastery.

Our space prioritises readers and our desire for collective learning and unlearning. Regardless of your titles or profession, when you enter RWL you’re a reader learning from other readers.

Being wrong about something is nothing to be ashamed of.

We must reject societal ideas of shaming people who are wrong or fail at something, and instead welcome experimental and creative ways of viewing the world (if their intention is to improve it for humanity). Failure is also ok, we want to create a community that helps you to keep trying. Book club, and our other literary spaces, should be used for intellectual experiment and test our own limits.

We must Be open to changing our minds

Every single time you feel strongly about something, pause, take a deep breath and make a note of the circumstances that would make you change your opinion. If you’re never willing to change your opinion, you probably won’t have productive conversations when met with conflict. Conflict is ok (abuse is not). We must learn to engage conflicting ideas when we recognise that we may share a similar goal but different methodologies.
Protip: Ask “how” questions when your gut may want to ask “why” questions.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion

However, the moment you say it out loud you must be willing to have that opinion challenged.