Writing Mentorship
I work with writers on books, essays, and manuscripts that require both literary discipline and a capacity to hold difficult material. I’m a spaceholder who happens to be working on a manuscript. Compassion is a way of reading. Attunement is a way of sitting with someone. And this is how I read others and their work.
My own memoir is represented by Elias Altman, a partner at Massie McQuilkin & Altman. I have an MFA in creative nonfiction and have published in AGNI, Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, the LA Times, and the Boston Globe with a featured essay in Michael Pollan’s anthology Trips Worth Telling. I bring to your writing what I bring to my own work: attention at the level of the sentence, the scene, the argument, and the architecture of each piece.
I do not rewrite, nor do I impose my voice on yours. When something is not working in your manuscript, I articulate this clearly and partner with you to explore possible solutions. My job is to help you become a better reader in order to take your writing where you want it to be.
I work best with those writing rupture — adoption, abuse, illness, displacement, the territory where the life and the page press hard against each other. I also work well with writers moving across the intellectual-spiritual seam — plant medicine, ancestral work, indigenous cosmology, any material where the rational frame breaks down and most literary readers flinch. I will not flinch. I will not exoticize. I will not rush you toward resolution your material does not yet support.
My frame for writing is older than the career frame. I understand writing as a practice of attention — the instrument through which a person develops the capacity to tell the truth about their life. If your goal is to write what your life is asking you to write, we might be a good match. Once it’s there, I can guide you in strategically placing your work in literary magazines, querying agents, and submitting to publishers.
It is your birthright to tell your story.
“Make your life a work of art.”— Friedrich Nietzsche
Writing a book has all the elements of the birth cycle: conception, gestation, check-ups, research, breathing, nausea, and delivery. The process is the same and yet the experience is different for everyone, for every book. From the initial stages to the end game, I will support you throughout the life of your project.
- Helping to define the scope of your book
- Developing a working introduction and developing an outline
- Maintaining enthusiasm and stamina through the revision process
- Working through writer’s block
- Staying focused and composed during the “murky middle”
- Polishing the final draft
- Educating on self-publishing vs traditional publishing vs the middle ground
- Querying agents
- Navigating negotiations with publishers
- Readying your marketing and publicity
