Two floors up in the Berry Building on Cuba Street, past the usual clatter of bars and boutiques, there's a desk with your name on it, whether or not anyone outside the room would call you a writer yet. It is a calm haven of wooden desks, mood lighting and comfy chairs with a communal kitchenette, and a view of Wellington’s cosmopolitan quarter peeping through the window.
The Wellington Writers' Studio is a shared workspace built around a simple idea: that writing rarely pays, and almost never comes with an office. Founded as a social enterprise, it offers space designed not for freelancers, but for people doing work that may never be paid at all, sustained instead by accountability, proximity, and camaraderie. It operates as a social enterprise, with its primary income stream being membership fees. The membership model is closer to a gym than an office: an ongoing, affordable commitment to a practice, rather than a desk rented against billable hours. It's inspired by the dozens of shared workspaces for writers in New York, which Wellington writer and founder Emily Broadmore visited in 2002. The Wellington studio's membership fee is $150 per month by month for rolling 24/7 access, or $25 per day to drop in casually. Private dedicated desk space is available for additional fees, short or long term depending on availability. The studio currently has around 50 members.
"I think of it like a gym membership, keeping me accountable to the ongoing project of my craft," says Kyan, a screenwriter and member who spent three years looking for a space like it before it existed. "Almost all co-working spaces are budgeted assuming the people coming there are getting paid work. And I don't know if you've heard, but writers are famously not well compensated."
While working at the studio, Kyan has drafted multiple feature scripts and a TV pilot, and written the NZ Film Commission-funded short She Floats Over The Neighbour's Fence Every Night, the first half scrawled on a flight, the rest finished the following week at a desk in the Berry Building, alongside the funding application. A feature-length version is now underway, with the short due to shoot by the end of the year. "A great chef can cook anywhere," Kyan says, "but they're much more likely to make a great meal in a good kitchen with proper knives."
"It's not just the space itself that feels like it sanctions writing, but the people that form its community too," says Oberon, who has run the studio over the course of the past two years. He says that the space creates "chances for spontaneity, collaboration, or even just the accountability of knowing someone at the desk over is working on their novel or collection of poetry and you should be too."
There's a second, quieter principle underneath the membership model – no one is asked to prove they belong. There's no submission process or publication history required at the door. "If you write, you're a writer, that's all," founder Emily Broadmore says. "There's no test to get in. No bar to meet." It is a flattening of hierarchy that, in a literary culture often organised around gatekeeping; competitions, agents, prizes, MFA cohorts, reads as a genuinely different starting premise – that the studio exists to support the making of the work, not to adjudicate who is allowed to call it art.
That ethos extends to the building itself, which doubles as informal community infrastructure, offered to not-for-profits and creative groups for a $50–$100 koha, and used by everyone from touring writers to a group of Porirua College students who now treat it as a regular fixture. There are also fortnightly talks that add a loose structure to that community — "more structured chances," Emily puts it, "to engage in something like parallel play."
The talks include lunchtime sessions with writers such as Jennifer Trevelyan, whose debut novel was released last year, and editor and reviewer, Anna Knox. There is variety between genres and something for all writers. They generally last an hour and give valuable Q&A and networking time at the end.
Ask what success looks like, in the absence of growth targets or profit margins, and the answer is often not about output at all. "To a certain extent it's the people who are the metric of success," Emily says. "We've got a community of people who enjoy the space, the atmosphere. They find it a conducive space to work their craft, with opportunities to showcase and collaborate. If the people report that they find the space and all of its attendant factors useful, then that's success in my book."
Pressed to describe the atmosphere itself, the language turns almost mystical: a room oscillating between the tapping of keys and the scratching of pens, laughter, argument, the clink of glasses on a Friday. "It's somewhere in between the everyday moments of focus and folly that the mysticism arises," Emily says. "I'm not sure where. I'm not sure what it is, but it works."
It's a hard thing to scale deliberately, and the studio doesn't pretend to try. The culture, as she puts it, is simply "informed by the people who make it up." What the Wellington Writers' Studio has built instead is an infrastructure loose enough to hold that unpredictability:asking nothing of the members except that they show up and do the work, on whatever terms that work happens to take.
As the studio's own invitation puts it, plainly: "Come check us out. We write every day, and on Friday we sometimes have a little drink."
