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March 28, 2019How Heated Fitness Classes Improved My (Writing) Life
It’s a given that entrepreneurs are supposed to invest in their business, accumulate assets, and build something bigger than themselves. Writing is what I do, it’s my business. When I started teaching, ...
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October 23, 2019The Surgical Evolution of a Poem
Last spring one of my students confessed that she wasn’t sure what she was writing was real poetry because she didn’t know a lot about technique and form, and she was concerned that her poetic toolbox ...
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January 31, 2020Quick and Dirty on Communication and Inviting Writers to Do All the Things
It’s a beautiful thing when writers make money. It’s an incredible feeling to open up your email and see all the love, invites, and possible project collaborations. This influx is not constant, it ...
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December 05, 2019The Unselfish Act of Being Alone
I want to talk about the power and necessity of being alone.It’s 4:30 am and I should be asleep, but jet lag is real. And I can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t be thinking about exhaustion ...
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June 12, 2020On Collaboration and Trust
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." – Helen Keller I crave collaboration. When I was young, I had no desire to connect or work closely with people in the way that I do today. ...
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September 18, 2020How writing rituals saved me from quitting as a writer
I define my writing ritual as a series of unique actions taken that tells my brain it’s writing and creation time. This is part preparation, part boundary-setting, part protective aura. I know that ...
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December 30, 2020Just because I don’t “look” like an editor...
Just because I don’t “look” like an editor... I remember the first time I went to pick up the mail from our post office box, when I was the managing editor at Room magazine, and was told by one ...
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July 30, 2018
On Staying Hungry
One night after a reading years ago, before any of us had published a book, I and another writer I know gave a third writer friend a pretty hard time about not wanting to submit stories to magazines. ...
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July 30, 2018
The Part of It You Don't See
If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...
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July 21, 2018
You Just Need to Write a Bestseller
If you’re a writer and you’re not rich and famous—so what I mean is, if you’re a writer—you’ve heard this one, often enough from someone who doesn’t write fiction or maybe even read it.Have ...