Lee Phillips is a writer and filmmaker based in New York City. She’s the fiction editor of Paloma Magazine. Her latest short fiction piece “The Long Fall,” was published in Sarka Journal’s fourth issue. Before that, her short story, “Transfiguration” was anthologized in Car Crash Collective’s latest print edition. Her poetry chapbook, Space We Can Only Cross with a Rocket, was published by Irrelevant Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Dream Boy Book Club, Byrdie, Refinery29, Office Magazine, Document Journal, and others. Her short film, Observations of the World Around Us, premiered at Nitehawk Cinema with Nobudge. She loves Lord of the Rings and her Pomeranian, Soapy!

What has your writing journey looked like so far?

I’m very lucky that I have always known I wanted to be a writer. I went to an arts high school and had some amazing writing teachers, some insane ones. The insane ones convinced me that writing came from a place of pain, and my 20’s was about learning that my best writing came from clarity and joy and love, even if it dealt with darker themes. On the bright side, taking writing seriously from a young age allowed me to get through that first awkward stage of a writers journey very early on. The one with the posturing, the copying other people’s voices, the self indulgence, etc. Not that my writing is perfect or done evolving, far from it. But it’s allowed me to find my own voice in my 20’s much sooner than I think I would have otherwise.

I was a freelance writer for a long time, doing copy and editorial. Now I’m more focused on my own personal projects, screenwriting, fiction and personal essays.

What is your current project about?

I’m currently working on two proposals. One for a non-fiction book called Girls, Together, which explores the teenage girl diary as a vital cultural text. The other is a short story called “Tingles” that is based off of a screenplay I wrote.

What challenges have come up in your process?

I think my biggest challenge as a writer is holding myself to an incredibly high standard. I become so focused on the end result that it impedes the creative process. For example I think of a zine project and instead of writing it, I start sketching out the marketing plan. I think that connects to a larger issue so many of us writers on the internet have. It’s so important now to be branded as a writer, it’s not enough to write.

Of course my analytical marketing mind loves the strategy aspect, but still, I struggle with shame when I put so much creative energy into “shallow” pursuits. I oscillate between wanting to be accepted on the internet, by my peers, to be a “literary it girl” as cliche and awful as that sounds, and wanting to delete everything and move to the country to dive into my own work.

It’s such a tired and unoriginal dilemma and I try not to think about it too hard. We’re all trying to navigate that.

Do you approach your prose writing differently when you intend for it to be translated to screen?

In this instance, I had already written “Tingles” as a script. It sounds crazy to turn a screenplay into a short story to be then turned back into a movie. But it allows us to create IP that we can sell as a film, book or podcast, instead of just as a film.

When I’m writing it into a short story, the goal is to add more interiority and voice than a screenplay might have but keep the traditional three acts of a film. You want to be able to draw someone in with the prose, but still let them imagine it as a strong movie with momentum and character development. Compared to a traditional short story I’m writing, there’s a lot less discovery in the process. I know exactly each beat I need to hit at each point in the story. But it’s almost like approaching the story from a different angle.

Screenwriting is more prescriptive. It requires you to see the setting and action and hear the dialogue. Prose requires so much more feeling. I’m finding layers in the short story that weren’t in the screenplay. In a way I’m doing a lot of the kind of discovery work that an actor would when they’re bringing a character from a screenplay to life. I’m finding all the in between moments, the subtle feelings, mannerisms, etc so that the story feels alive on the page.

I think it’s a great exercise to do for any script.

How did you find your agent?

My agent found me! I posted a video on Instagram about feeling disconnected from my female audience and it went viral. My agents saw it and liked me and my work and reached out. I feel incredibly lucky. They’re such amazing women.

How do you support yourself financially?

I work freelance in marketing! So I have clients where I manage their social media accounts or create social media for them. I’m constantly “firing” clients so I have more time to write, and then when I’m broke and still not writing I go on the hunt for more clients. Life is full of contradictions. The truth is that I don’t enjoy this work. It’s the classic English degree to social media pipeline. In a perfect world I would be an editor at a literary magazine. I volunteer as fiction editor for Paloma Mag, and it’s so fulfilling. I just love reading and workshopping fiction!

Do you find that your work intersects with your creative writing or vice versa?

I’ve learned a lot about how to make content and market yourself. Other than that the only way it interacts is by being my scapegoat for why I don’t write more.

How do you make time for writing?

The truth is that I only actually work (for money) 20 hours a week. I have all the time in the world for writing. My issue is that I love to stare out the window, scroll on my phone, or journal about why I’m not writing. Luckily I am the kind of writer that works in bursts. Sometimes I won’t write for two months and then bang out a short story in a week. A lot of the time I’m just processing my feelings, life around me, and integrating all of that into a truth that I can use for a story. I call it the integration period and I wrote about it in my last Substack article, “The Writer’s Life Is Available To You Now.”

What’s one writing class, book, or other resource that has been particularly influential to your development?

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Faith of A Writer by Joyce Carol Oates

How do you grapple with societal expectations of success?

What I’m dealing with right now is the fear that I won’t do anything noteworthy before I have a baby. I’ve always wanted to be a mother. But I worry that since I’m so sensitive, and it takes a lot of energy for me to write as is, that my ability to be creative will plummet when I have a new born and then young children. That kind of puts a pressure on the whole success thing. The only option is to just really believe that it will all work out. It helps you feel better and it also reframes your actions to align with that belief.

As corny as it sounds, meeting my boyfriend (and future husband) really helped with the whole existential dread of success. Our love has healed me in so many ways. I am so excited about our life together, our future family. I know that no matter what happens in my career I will have done something meaningful to me.

What’s one writing-related accomplishment you’re proud of?

Every time I finish writing something it feels like I will never write again. Every time I do write again it feels like a miracle. I am so proud that I can write. I’m proud of my ability to feel deeply and transmute that onto the page. It has been my life purpose since I was 10. In terms of actual accomplishments, I went to Venice to cover the film festival for Document Journal. As a filmmaker and writer it was a dream come true. A very pinch me moment.

What are you aiming to accomplish next and what are you doing to get there?

For the past month I have been sitting at the base of a fear mountain and looking up at it wondering how I will get to the top. After getting an agent, suddenly everything became very real. It was as if the “race” had started. It was time for me to prove to myself and the industry that I deserved to be there. That I could write, that I could produce, that I was marketable, that I could “do it.”

I put off working on my proposal and the other short story (we’re hoping to sell the film IP through the short story) because suddenly it mattered so much more. A lot of self doubt came up. I just had to remind myself that I was in this position for a reason, that I will figure it out as I always do. I just had to trust that I’m a capable writer and begin somewhere.

Find Lee Phillips on Substack, her personal Instagram, and the Girls, Together Instagram.

What other questions do you have for Lee? Comment below.

A little about the essay

This is about freshman year of high school, featuring co-dependent friendships, thongs from Charlotte Russe, crushes, and important cinema from the 90s and early-00s like Step Up, Cruel Intentions, and Moulin Rouge. Under the surface, it’s about the competing messages about sexuality I was receiving from my parents/religion versus from pop culture/my peers. It’s about believing everything is a sin and being drawn to it anyway.

First, here’s the scene that was published. Then I’ll show you some previous versions.

The dialogue is memorable, you can visualize what’s going on, and there’s reflection so readers understand why the moment matters.

Now let’s take it allllll the way back to the first draft.

This is bare-bones. I’m still trying to figure about what I’m saying. There are placeholders where I need description, like “the coolest person I ever met” and “she had our complete attention.” It cuts off without reflection, leaving readers with no idea what’s going on internally. Overall, this version provides basic scaffolding for me to build upon.

Draft 2:

Here, I’m trying harder to fill in description. I replaced “she had our complete attention” with “we leaned in,” but I held onto “the coolest person,” perhaps realizing Alexandra needed to be more formally introduced earlier in the essay. I like the addition of “our mouths dropped open.” And I made a nod to reflection by connecting this to kissing a boy in an empty house in two almost identical sentences.

Draft ~10:

I added more of Alexandra’s vibe with the line, “I’d have sex with a veggie burger.” The scene has a little more build up and better pacing, and I slowed down on my reflection, explaining my fears and where they came from. This isn’t much different from the final version. After this, I mostly tinkered with wording and made the reflection more precise.

If you want to read the full essay, you can find it here. It means so much to me that you support my work!

Lastly, some writing prompts inspired by this essay:

Prompt #1: Write about a time in your life when you wanted to change. What informed your ideas of who you wanted to be?

Prompt #2: Write about a time when you were influenced by two competing messages (possibly coming from parents, friends, media, school, religion, strangers, or other.) Which message did you listen to?

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Slate, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more. I teach frequent online writing workshops. My full class list can be found here.

Nicole Comforto is an award-winning comedy writer and pretty average parent. She writes with her husband about parenting, OCD, & co-writing novels at heyhoney.substack.com.

What has your writing journey looked like so far?

I’ve always wanted to be an author, but I started pursuing it seriously when I was 31 years old. I was living in New York City at the time, I had recently moved back to the U.S. from Paris, and finally felt I had enough life experience to write something important. My first project was a nonfiction book proposal based on my experience working in education policy at UNESCO, called The Secret Power of Teachers. Thanks to being in NYC, I was able to meet a few agents through networking, and one of them signed me.

Unfortunately, that book didn’t sell on the first round, and my agent ghosted me after that. I was devastated. I spent a year revising it and querying it again, but ultimately it wasn’t happening. At that point I decided that if I was going to invest years in a book, I was going to choose something more fun, and that’s when I pivoted to fiction. I had recently moved back to my hometown, Seattle, so I pulled some talented friends together to form a critique group. With their support and encouragement, I wrote my first novel, a romantic comedy set in Paris.

After revising that novel, I queried it to about 25 agents in 2019 and got what I now realize was a very high full manuscript request rate (about 12 full requests) from agents, but ultimately they all passed around the time the pandemic hit. I decided to give up on that novel and focus on the next one. My husband, who is also very talented and creative, and I decided (while our two kids were young and we were barely sleeping) that it would be fun to try to write a novel together. This became our pandemic project: after the kids went to bed, we’d pour some wine and write this fun escapist story about a kidnapped reality TV bachelor. It took a while to finish and revise, but I knew this one was really special, and I was determined to query it until we got an agent, which we finally did in 2021. That book was also a finalist in a Launchpad contest for books with film potential, and during all this, I wrote an essay for Modern Love about our journey with my husband’s OCD diagnosis, and got the thrill of a lifetime when it was selected for publication. It felt like my writing career was really taking off!

But… Buzzworthy died on submission, too. It was heartbreaking. We had many very complimentary messages from editors, who loved the writing and the story, but just felt it was too unique to “break out” into the market. Meanwhile, we had another fun novel idea to work on together. At our agent’s suggestion, we made this one a romantic comedy to make it easier to sell, but so far it looks like that one is not selling, either.

This year I had the idea for a new novel, a commercial romance. I wrote it fairly quickly over the course of a few months. I love co-writing with my husband, but the process of co-writing can be a lot slower, so it’s fun to do projects on my own sometimes as well. I am currently working with my agent on edits.

What is your current project about?

This week my husband and I are actually on vacation (with the kids in camp!) so we are diving back into Buzzworthy, the first novel we wrote together, to do some rewrites. Buzzworthy is a satirical comedy about two sisters who travel across the world to a fictional island nation to try to find a kidnapped reality TV bachelor.

The sisters couldn’t be more different: Jo is a history professor, and Sam is a paparazzi journalist, but because of current events and AI, both of their jobs are being eliminated. The only thing they have in common is a love for an international reality TV dating show, The Catch. When the show’s most famous bachelor, Hugh Chang, disappears, both sisters have reasons to find him: Jo fears that history could repeat itself and his death could spark a world war, and Sam wants to prove that only a human can get the real scoop.

I love this book so much. It’s such a perfect blend of everything I enjoy in books (adventure, comedy, romance) and everything Michael loves (slightly futuristic, offbeat, technology). It didn’t get picked up in 2021, but we still feel it has so much potential, so we are rewriting it to respond to some of the current hot topics in tech.

What challenges have come up in your process?

So many challenges! Life, particularly kids and jobs, often gets in the way. When we write together, we love to do “writing dates” and bring our laptops to a bar or coffee shop. We usually each pick a different chapter to work on, and then eventually we read each other’s work. But lately, a lot of stressors in life have made this kind of time nearly impossible. Whenever we do have some time, like this week when we are both taking vacation from work while kids are in camp, we always love working on creative projects. But we could get a lot done if we had more weeks like this!

For your first three books, do you think there was a reason they didn’t sell or was it simply because many wonderful books don’t make it to market? What did you learn from them?

It’s really hard to say. I do think many wonderful books don’t make it to market. I actually know this for a fact, because my critique group is full of incredibly talented writers, and so far only two out of seven of us have agents, and one is published. I am definitely not the most talented member of that group (but I have probably sent the most queries)!

I think what I’ve learned so far about querying, and being on submission, is that you can put a lot of work into writing a high quality book, but after that there’s still a lot of chance involved, because somebody has to choose your book over all the others in their pile.

That said, I’ve also written a lot of pretty unique books, especially the ones I’ve co-written with Michael, and I am slowly learning that the publishing industry doesn’t love to take chances. So for my latest project, I tried to write something a little simpler and easier to market… I think. But I’m not actually sure I’ve done that well enough. We’ll see.

What was it like landing a piece in Modern Love?

It’s been five years since I got my essay, A Marriage Stressed by Obsessions and Compulsions, published in Modern Love, and it still feels like a dream!

I’ve been reading Modern Love for years and always wanted to write an essay for it, but it took many years to find the right story. Then, in 2018, my husband developed severe OCD when we were pregnant with our second child, and we rushed to get him diagnosed and treated, and then had to move on to parenting a new baby, and shortly after that, the pandemic hit. Because it all happened so quickly, we’d never really had a chance to explain to our friends and family, or really even process for ourselves, what had happened. When I wrote the essay in February 2021, I found a structure for the story that felt really powerful and beautiful, and I knew we had a unique story to tell. After some revision, including helpful feedback from my critique group, I submitted it to Modern Love.

I waited about four months for a response, and then one morning in late July 2021, I got a brief email from Dan Jones, the editor of Modern Love, asking to have a call. I screamed so loudly that my dad spilled coffee all over himself!

After that everything happened very quickly; we spoke the following week, and it was published less than two weeks later. We spent a lot of time going back and forth with edits, and I quickly made myself an author email account.

The most wonderful part of the whole process was hearing responses from readers. First, it seemed like everyone I had ever met reached out to congratulate me. Then I started hearing from strangers who had read the essay and some part of it resonated with them or helped them. That continued for several years, actually. I still meet people once in a while who remember that piece and what it meant to them.

As authors who aren’t yet published, I think it’s sometimes easy to forget that the whole point of writing is to connect and share something meaningful with readers. That’s what my Modern Love essay did for me, and I am so grateful for it.

How do you support your writing (and life) financially?

My husband and I both work—he’s in tech, and I work for nonprofits, currently as a part-time grant writer for an arts organization. With two kids in elementary school, our lives are pretty full.

Luckily, writing isn’t a terribly expensive hobby; my main expenses are taking an occasional class or writing workshop, and also renting a vacation house for a writing retreat once in a while, either with Michael or with my critique group. I have also made some income as a writer through our Substack (Hey Honey), teaching classes on querying, and I had a lucrative gig for about a year writing stories for a video game company.

I would love to make enough income from writing that we could scale back our paid work and focus more on creative work, but that definitely hasn’t happened yet.

Do you find that your work feeds your creative writing or vice versa?

I am really lucky at the moment to work at an arts organization that has, among other things, a wonderful writers conference as well as artist residencies. So I’ve gotten to meet and be inspired by some amazing writers through my job. In fact, I began writing the first scene of my latest novel in a writing workshop at work last summer, and I finished the most recent round of edits while using one of our studios to do a mini-residency. Of course, most of my job is not related to my creative work, but it’s very exciting when I do get to do creative things at work.

How do you make time for writing?

I’m not one of those people who can consistently block off time for daily writing, although I would love to do that someday. Instead, I have to work around whatever is going on in my life, and seize the opportunity to write when I can. Sometimes I can get away from home and work and kids and write a lot in a few days; other times I may go weeks without actively working on a novel.

I do find there are little things I can do most days, though, to keep pushing my career forward, whether it’s reading craft articles, posting or interacting with other writers on Substack, thinking or talking about my novel, etc. I still meet regularly with the critique group that I started back in 2017, and that helps motivate me to have something new to share every six weeks or so, even if it’s small. And I’m always reading and talking about books, and Michael and I sometimes watch shows together and discuss character and structure and why they do or don’t work.

What’s one writing class, book, or other resource that has been influential to your development?

I think the book Save the Cat Writes a Novel was probably the biggest catalyst for me.

I read it after I wrote my first novel, and Michael and I used it to structure our first co-written novel, Buzzworthy. When you’re co-writing, you can’t really just make it up as you go, you have to get much better at plotting the whole story in advance. Save the Cat gave us a framework that allowed us to work together really well. Sometimes constraints help you get really creative and come up with ideas you never would have stumbled upon elsewhere, and that’s what it did for us.

What’s one writing-related accomplishment you’re proud of?

Definitely getting into Modern Love. I actually got to participate in a live Modern Love event that I helped organize a few years ago. We packed an event space in Seattle and read our essays to an audience, with Miya Lee from The New York Times moderating. It was so incredible to read my essay out loud and see people reacting in real time. Michael and I have also been guests on quite a few podcasts to talk about our experience.

Sharing this story was really important to both of us because Michael doesn’t fit the stereotype of a person with OCD at all (he is actually pretty messy and creative and absent-minded), and in the process of figuring out why he was suddenly having debilitating attacks of anxiety, we learned that OCD is both widely misunderstood and also very treatable. I’m really proud of both of us for sharing a story that helped many people understand it better.

What are you aiming to accomplish next and what are you doing to get there?

I want a couple of big book deals, and preferably at least one film adaptation! (Especially for Buzzworthy — it would make such a great movie, starring either Henry Golding or Simu Liu as the reality TV bachelor, depending on whether you ask me or Michael).

That’s the big dream, but honestly a more modest book deal and author career would be great, too. I just really want to share my stories with the world. Everyone I talk to about my books says they want to read them, and it’s been so frustrating to say over and over that they’ll have to wait… indefinitely. Each novel has something important to say, much like the Modern Love essay; they are about entertaining first and foremost, but also about seeing the world in new ways, and I just feel really strongly that they deserve a place in the world. I’m going to keep at it until something breaks through the publishing barrier, and then hopefully get some of my backlist published.

What other questions do you have for Nicole? Comment below.

Avery Danae (she/they) is a multi-published writer, lifelong learner, singer, artist, and cultural advocate from New Jersey. They hold a BA with honors in African American Studies and Creative Writing from Princeton University, where they wrote under the tutelage of 2025 National Book Award winning poet Patricia Smith. As a Black, Disabled, Chronically Ill, Autistic femme, Avery writes about her lived experiences navigating the medical industrial complex, academia, and the never ending pressure to cosplay as the Strong Black Woman. Her poems and essays appear in Cripping* Youth Ministry: An Intersectional Vision for Working With Disabled Youth, edited by Justin Forbes and Erin Raffety; 2020: The Year That Changed America, edited by Kevin Powell’s Writing Workshop; New Jersey Bards Poetry Review 2024; African Voices; and more.

What has your writing journey looked like so far?

As stereotypical as it is to say, I’ve always been a writer. I started writing short stories about my kindergarten (mis)adventures and fanfiction based on the Disney Channel shows I loved at the time: The Suite Life on Deck, Wizards of Waverly Place, Good Luck Charlie, etc. One day in July 2019, I felt a calling to make writing a more consistent practice in my life. I looked up different apps on Google Play until I came across Poetizer, which at the time was not deploying a subscription-based model. I started writing poetry when the mood struck, and I slowly gained traction and fell in love with poetry. Additionally during this time, I took poetry workshops through the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) virtually where I was taught by Rutgers University Newark MFA candidates. And in college, I had the immense privilege of minoring in Creative Writing to complement my African American Studies major and taking workshops with Paul Muldoon, Kathleen Ossip, and Patricia Smith. All of whom are just as lovely in person as they are on the page.

I switched to posting my poems on Instagram and immersing myself in the writing community there until I had enough in 2023. Enough of the constant comparison to other writers and enough of the FOMO I experienced from seeing high school classmates’ stories of them seemingly having fun and traveling. Enough of short form content once Instagram made the transition to capitalizing on Reels. And enough of performing to please an algorithm. That meant parting ways with my closest poet friends on Instagram. However, my mental health precedes my need to be an Instapoet.

Today I use Substack — not only because I love longform content like many of us here do, but because I rarely experience FOMO and the need to compare myself to other people when using it. It’s also the one place on the internet where I feel so deeply connected to other Chronically Ill/Disabled writers that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Quitting social media has made me creative in my approach to networking with fellow writers/authors, researching literary magazine submission opportunities, and keeping abreast of what’s happening in the writing world. I subscribe to newsletters outside of Substack. I recently launched my website/portfolio. I am now on Opol.Space, which brings me back to the days of writing poetry on Poetizer without the distraction of an algorithm.

What is your current project about?

My current writing project is “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” (incidentally, the title comes from W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk). I write about my experiences enduring racism, ableism, and medical gaslighting at Princeton before and after my mental health hospitalization in March 2024. While the primary intention of this project is to hold accountable the people and systems that contributed negatively to my college experience, I also confront the internalized ableism I experienced as a result of my mental decline — from being diagnosed with fibromyalgia during my sophomore year, to attempting suicide on two separate occasions while living alone, to navigating the mental health industrial complex at Princeton. This is not a narrative of me overcoming my mental and chronic illnesses, or finding a magic cure. Rather, this project underscores the challenge of coming into my own while living in a body and brain that often work against me, at a university where I could have been the eighth student to die by suicide in the last five years due to lack of institutional support for mental health.

“How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” started out as my senior thesis for my African American Studies degree, drawing on Black feminist theory, disability studies, anthropology, and literary analysis of the poems I wrote for my second senior thesis of the same name for my creative writing minor. After submitting it in April, I took a break to recover from what turned out to be the most stressful and most traumatizing book I ever wrote. I plan on revising it so it reads less like a chronological memoir with scholarly components and more like a memoir-in-essays to show that disability, grief, time, and healing are nonlinear. Additionally, I hope to incorporate more themes of chosen family and disability pride in later drafts, because what Princeton administrators lacked in offering me support during the darkest time of my life, I made up for in investing in my friendships and engaging in my special interests as an Autistic student.

What are some challenges that have come up in your process?

Writing the first draft of “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” took a huge toll on my mental and physical health. I recalled traumatic events from freshman and sophomore year that I am still healing from, which reignited my PTSD nightmares and flashbacks. I experienced the worst fibromyalgia pain in the Spring semester of my senior year due to the stress I was under. This made it difficult to walk and concentrate. When I was not in class or at church, I was bedbound; it was debilitating. Another challenge was not having distance from my topic. Most students wrote about issues they cared about in their senior theses without writing explicitly about themselves. They could submit their thesis and be done with it. My thesis is my real life. Themes like mental illness, grief, and chronic illness remain constants today. I can’t escape it, so definitely I struggled with where to draw the line between compartmentalizing my feelings to finish this project and holding space to feel my feelings.

And of course, I felt terrified at what other people would think about the project I still do. There is this myth that students are immune from mental illness if they manage to get into Princeton. Well, the truth is our suicide rate is the highest out of all eight Ivy League universities. There are many Princeton alumni like me who regret attending the institution due to the pressure they faced to hide their struggles for the sake of academic rigor. At the same time, had I not embarked on writing this project and discussed it with classmates and friends senior year, I would not have known my circumstances, albeit unique, were far more common than I initially thought.

How do you support yourself financially?

I work part time as a remote Grant Writing intern for a local youth and arts education nonprofit in Northern New Jersey. I research potential donors and opportunities to apply for grants that could fund our present and future programs in after-school homework help, music, theater, and student leadership. Over the years, arts education nonprofits (such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center) have been instrumental in helping me not only refine my craft but trust my voice as a writer. However, I know that not everybody has had the same opportunities to explore the arts as I have, which is why gaining experience in grant writing is important to me in terms of giving back to marginalized communities and increasing their overall access to arts education.

How do you find that your work in advocacy intersects with your creative writing or vice versa?

I always joke that my resume is filled with seemingly disjointed side quests. Designing an orientation program for Princeton’s Great Class of 2027 that intersected with arts education, racial justice, and disability justice. Teaching English to Spanish speaking adults. Teaching poetry to elementary school aged girls. Working as an Archival Producer on a documentary film centered around Black manhood. Interviewing current and former Princeton students as part of oral history projects. And of course, my own writing projects. But what they all have in common is my love of people: collecting their stories, understanding their humanity, holding space for them to be vulnerable in ways that they probably never have before even if we don’t inherently share the same culture. In learning about other people, I’ve learned more about myself which has made me more daring to confront my trauma, make sense of my intersectionality, express my creativity, and understand what my true values are through writing. Plus, it’s a big reason why I majored in African American Studies. No matter what I do as a cultural advocate, I will always center Black women because we deserve soft places to land, to be held, to be taken care of after being strong and taking care of everyone else for so long. Writing will always be the main vessel I use to drive this message home.

How do you make time for writing?

Considering that I have been in a prolonged fibromyalgia flare since October, making time for writing has been difficult and is a question I’ve been grappling with more as a recent college graduate without the defined structure of creative writing workshops or a thesis deadline. So I’ll answer this as if it’s an ideal day without chronic fatigue, brain fog, or other deadlines.

Ideally, I would dedicate one or two days per week to writing in the early morning when I’m the most creative; between 5:30am and 9;30am. What worked for me in college was doing a modified Pomodoro method where I worked for 90 minutes, took a break for 25-30 minutes, and repeated until I was either finished, had a club meeting/meal with a friend, or more often when my body and brain decided they’ve had enough. Usually I can crank writing out in two 90 minute sessions. I try not to write after work and in the evening because I’m not as alert, but there are exceptions like when I have a particularly huge burst of energy. Additionally, I love writing drafts by hand before typing. Not only does it give me a break from using technology, but it brings me back to my childhood writing stories in my notebooks.

Given my situation, my best writing happens when I’m laying in bed. I have Google Docs, Samsung Notes, and Substack installed on my phone, so I can easily pull those up when the muse strikes to record ideas or write full length pieces. I can adjust positions if I feel uncomfortable. Laying in bed is especially helpful on high pain days when I’m exhausted because I can take a break from writing to take a nap (which is always a good call; I wake up brimming with more clarity about the direction of my writing). But one thing’s for sure: I don’t force myself to write every day or else I’ll treat it as something I have to do as opposed to something I want to do.

What’s one writing class, book, or other resource that has been particularly influential to your development?

So many! But two books that changed my approach for the better are Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez. Rest is Resistance argues that rest and imagination are crucial to combating what Hersey nicknames “grind culture,” or today’s society rooted in capitalism and white supremacy. I read it after having no work/life balance my freshman year of college, and it’s taken on added meaning in the wake of my fibromyalgia diagnosis. But as far as my writing life is concerned, it’s given me a lot to think about in terms of cultivating a sustainable writing practice grounded in slow creativity, deep thinking, and self-preservation. I do not want to keep burning out especially since most of my writing is tied to confronting past trauma.

I read The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop at the recommendation of a former teaching artist I had at NJPAC. Chavez, a creative writing professor and alumna of the University of Iowa’s MFA Program, wrote this book to decolonize creative writing workshops. Thus allowing for BIPOC writers to actively participate in feedback sessions, to contribute to building the class syllabi, and to see themselves represented through video conferences with established writers who look like them. My favorite chapter was about Chavez involving her students in making the class syllabi, drawing from different songs, television shows, and other forms of media they regarded as model texts beyond creative nonfiction or poetry or fiction. My writing process functions the same way. I have many literary inspirations like Audre Lorde, Chen Chen, bell hooks, Sofia Aguilar, Michelle Garcia King, and Yasmine Bolden, however, I would be remiss if I excluded music, YouTube videos, Substack Notes/essays, African American history, disability, children’s television, higher education, community service, and entrepreneurship (think Shark Tank) as my model texts. The book is also a game changer when it comes to designing creative writing workshops, and as a future teaching artist, I look forward to taking the anti-racist workshop model outside of academia and applying it to designing affordable community-based creative writing workshops.

How do you grapple with societal expectations of success?

I’ve accepted that there will always be someone who asks me, “What’s next?,” in hopes that I would give them a straight answer about going to graduate school or entering the workforce full time. I want to give them a straight answer: getting paid to write and be a teaching artist with sides of making art and singing and doing graphic design — all for fun and not for profit. But I don’t; I shrink myself so that someone doesn’t tell me my creative dreams are unrealistic or unattainable or that I should be aspiring to a “real job” (whatever the fuck that means) or else I’m wasting my degree. I realize now that those who are so hellbent on misunderstanding me when it comes to my dreams are people I should not allow access to my life, as no matter what I do it will never be good enough for them. I instead focus on sharing my creative dreams, asking for guidance from friends and mentors who are building lives dedicated to service and/or arts education, or who may be pursuing a different career path but share in the same pressure as me to do something practical even if it makes them miserable.

I also embrace being behind, though this is a concept I grapple with. I find myself subconsciously setting five or ten year timelines for myself to revise “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?,” to read a huge chunk of my TBR list, to travel to as many countries as possible before time runs out. Doing so sends me into a deeper fibromyalgia flare and causes me to question my self-worth. When I find myself getting worked up about being behind, I pause, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I am not on anyone else’s timeline but my own.

What’s one writing accomplishment you’re proud of?

Finishing both of my senior theses in April 2026. Completing a large project like a senior thesis — or in my case, two senior theses — requires a lot of stamina. I’m not saying I enjoyed every minute, however, knowing I was writing about the issues I cared about gave me the strength to finish. Due to debilitating chronic fatigue and prioritizing my Creative Writing thesis, I fell behind in writing my African American Studies thesis for weeks. But somehow, some way the weekend before the deadline, I managed to write the rest of it horizontally in Samsung Notes and copy and pasting it to Google Docs during a chronic fatigue episode. The words came easily, as I told my story through poetry in the first thesis and then I used my second thesis to articulate these same experiences using paragraphs and citations. That’s the last time I recall being in a true flow state with writing.

I received glowing feedback from my thesis advisor and my second reader, Lorgia Garcia Peña: author of the book Community as Rebellion, about navigating academia as a woman of color (WOC). It was an honor to have her read “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” and talk with her about our shared experiences and my writing process during my senior thesis defense. She even told me that she plans to teach parts of my thesis to students in a seminar she’s teaching about WOC feminisms, as my thesis is a robust, valuable contribution to not only Black disability studies but Black feminist theory. I may not have received any thesis prizes, but nothing can beat the joy I felt reading Professor Peña’s comments and hearing how my words had such a profound impact on her.

What are you aiming to accomplish next and what are you doing to get there?

Besides revising “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” for potential publication, I hope to write more creative nonfiction essays, poems, songs, and stories — whatever format I feel called to best express my ideas. I also want to keep taking life one day at a time as I fall back in love with slow creativity and the actual writing process and not just the final product.

Avery can be reached at thecriptimewriter@gmail.com; the Substack newsletter, Swerve Unknown; and Opol.Space as The Crip Time Writer. For a list of Avery’s current projects, published works, and to stay updated on their work, visit thecriptimewriter.tilda.ws.

What other questions do you have for Avery? Comment below.

My sister sent me a picture of herself working her remote job at her computer with her five-month-old baby lying on the carpet next to her. My sister is smiling at her husband taking the photo, a burp cloth rested under her computer monitor, and the baby is sleeping with her hands in little fists. I hearted the photo and sent a message with a teary-eyed emoji. Then I happily went back to editing my manuscript, which no one asked me to write and only a handful of people have read in its entirety, in the total silence of my empty house.

It made me wonder, is my writing life about anyone but me?

A lot of good things have come out of building a life around writing and teaching. This summer, I taught a huge nonfiction workshop full of writers working on exciting projects, some of whom have taken classes with me before. I’ve been fortunate to place essays in fun publications, and I met some of my best friends in grad school. But I’ve also spent hundreds of hours on pages that may never see the light of day when I could have been, I don’t know, helping other people? My husband is a physical therapist who literally takes away people’s pain every day, and my sister is raising a human child, something I have so far avoided partially because I wouldn’t be able to afford it with my current work/writing balance and also because I’m afraid of having to think about someone other than myself in the amount a baby would require.

I’m living my dream, just like my sister is living her dream as a working mom. Except my dream feels selfish and hers seems admirable. I’m “doing what I love,” but like, is that allowed?

Growing up, the worst thing I could do was think of myself. In Catholic school, I learned about saints who dedicated their lives to the poor and refused to consume any food except the Eucharist. I was told to “pray unceasingly” and to “die to myself” the way Jesus died for our sins. Everything felt selfish. Going to movies with friends and ordering a small popcorn was selfish when I could have given that money to the church. Also, how could I find time for fun when I never found time to pray the rosary?

Even though I left the church years ago, these thoughts have followed me, especially around the topic of motherhood. When my mom was my age, she already had five kids under eight. Being a mother was always framed as a sacrificial duty that would secure my path to Heaven. Now when I spend an afternoon hiking or editing my book or shopping for pants, I have moments where I float above my body and think I’m not supposed to have time for this. I supposed to be too busy keeping children alive or building some kind of other career that benefits society. Instead, I’ve had years of time to myself, but what have I been doing? Writing a collection of essays about my religious trauma?

After leaving the church, I had to force myself to reclaim the word “selfish.” “You know me, I’m selfish,” I’d tell myself when I declined a religious event or family obligation. Quickly, I became less resentful. My chronic acid reflux went away. I was a pleasant person to be around. I no longer felt stuck doing things I didn’t want to do. Now, though, I’m more ambivalent about the idea of selfishness. I want to live a life I love and a life that extends beyond myself. I don’t want to do something just because it feels like what I’m supposed to do, but I also don’t want to make everything all about me.

I know I’m not the only writer who has this flavor of self doubt. In my summer class, participants wrote brave, funny, and inventive essays, but their most common workshop questions were things like “would anyone want to read this?” or “is this even worth writing?” The rest of the group always answered with an enthusiastic “hell yes!” We wanted to read it because it made us understand ourselves and the world a little differently, because it reminded us what it means to be human, because it made us all feel more connected. As readers, we could clearly see the service the essay was providing, but as writers, we worry no one cares, that it’s all a waste of time.

Books have always meant a lot to me. As a kid, I read Ella Enchanted so many times I had paragraphs memorized. The Series of Unfortunate Events got me through middle school. My neurons rearranged when I read The Outsiders, Their Eyes Were Watching God and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Later, I fell in love with memoirs like The Chronology of Water, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Priestdaddy, Crying in H Mart, and so many more. This will forever be the summer I read There There and The Secret History. Life would not be the same without these books.

I have to consider—is being selfish really bad? Of course, there are destructive kinds of selfishness like hoarding resources or crossing boundaries. But I would argue I’m a more empathetic person since I stopped “dying to myself.” I can see other people better when I read and write, when I’m in touch with my own emotions. When I was religious, I had little capacity to feel beyond my own swallowed up resentment. It’s hard to understand others when you’re doing everything to stop yourself from feeling.

Looking at my marked up manuscript, I know I wrote it because I wanted to, but I also wrote it because I think I have a story that will resonate with people, because it’s the kind of book my younger self needed. There are a lot of girls like me who sat in youth groups and abstinence retreats, and I want to give them a story that offers camaraderie and hope for the future we choose for ourselves. That’s the work I’m doing for the time being, and maybe that’s enough.

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Slate, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more.

I teach frequent online writing workshops. My full class list can be found here.

With that, here is our first installment…

Hannah Zee Klein (she/her/hers) is a twenty-something writer and book publicist living in Manhattan. She owes her heart to her first home, the Pacific Northwest, where she fell in love with mountains and speculative fiction. In 2017, she moved east to earn her B.A. in English & Creative Writing from Wellesley College. At Wellesley, she received departmental honors, the Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship, and the Charlotte Paul Reese ‘38 Prize for Creativity in Writing. Now, Hannah dedicates her time to bettering her craft as a storyteller. She writes across genres but has a particular affinity for all things ghoulish and moody (think Eric La Rocca meets Shirley Jackson). When she isn’t writing, she’s proud to support a diverse array of bestselling & award-winning authors as a senior publicist at a Big 5 publisher. Hannah spends whatever time she has left searching for the best cappuccino in all of New York. It’s a harrowing search; cafe recommendations are always welcome.

What has your writing journey looked like so far?

I have been writing long-form fiction for as long as I have been able to read and write. This initially amounted to a few painful high fantasy and paranormal romance novels in my tween and teen years (yes, including a boarding school that featured star-crossed werewolf and vampire lovers), before I truly found my voice and passion in upmarket horror fiction in college. At Wellesley College, I had the privilege of pursuing a degree in English and Creative Writing. My honors thesis eventually evolved into the novel that is currently on submission with publishers.

What is your current project about?

My debut, There’s Nothing Wrong with Erik Heart, is a supernatural gothic horror novel set in the Pacific Northwest. Twenty-two-year-old recluse Erik Heart agrees to help his ailing father with his work. The catch: his father is a reaper, a piece of Death incarnate, and the job requires Erik to witness the final moments of the dying and sink into their memories, experiencing each death like a high. Forced to confront the hidden truths of countless lives, Erik soon finds himself reckoning with the darkest corners of his own.

When his first assignment brings him to a newborn’s deathbed, Erik forms an immediate connection with the infant’s grieving mother, Sarah Archer—never revealing that he was the one who reaped her daughter. As their relationship deepens, Erik’s obligation to reaping evolves into something far more dangerous. The more he reaps, the more alive he feels. But as his addiction intensifies, the boundaries of his identity begin to erode. Haunted by what he believes are visions, Erik can no longer distinguish between his own memories and those he has absorbed through reaping. To move forward, he’ll have to confront the truth about his past, his father, and the darkness he carries within himself.

What challenges have come up in the writing process?

For a very long time, I fancied myself a “serious writer” while lacking the necessary respect for the genre I was writing in. After years spent studying the classics and literary fiction, I had become somewhat fearful of writing a genre novel, even though genre books were the very stories that first inspired my love of reading and writing. As soon as I committed to writing a story I would unabashedly love as a reader, the novel truly came alive. I made the story darker, added a romantic subplot, allowed my main character to explore the full breadth of his sexuality, and raised the stakes with every revision.

How did you meet your agent?

Two years into the querying process (at which point I had received many no’s, a handful of full manuscript requests, and a few excruciating close calls of representation), a good friend recommended I reach out to an agent she knew who had expressed a desire for “weird girl fiction” at a recent gathering here in New York City. I sent off my query package that week. Shortly thereafter came a full manuscript request, and a month later I had signed with her.

It all felt like a dream—and something of a whirlwind—because I had genuinely begun to lose hope that I would find an agent so passionate about championing my debut. Thankfully, I did, and I cannot imagine working with anyone else.

What have you learned from the process of going on submission?

Rejection is as much a gift as it is a mainstay of any creative process because it is the first sign that people are actively engaging with your work. Before an agent or editor can reject your novel, they first have to read it—and my goal as a writer has always been simply to have people read what I’ve written.

With that in mind, I try to view every update from editors as a step forward, even when that update comes in the form of a pass.

How do you support yourself financially?

I am living the alternate dream of working as a book publicist at a Big Five publisher in New York City. In addition, I freelance by providing book-to-film rights coverage for several talent management and production companies. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to support myself through work in creative industries.

Do you find that your work as a publicist intersects with your creative writing or vice versa?

It’s important to keep “church and state” separate while working in publishing as a writer, but the two pursuits inevitably influence one another. My creative writing practice has made me a deeply empathetic publicist because I understand how vulnerable the path to publication can be for authors. Conversely, working as a publicist has been a masterclass in understanding the literary marketplace and learning how to effectively position a story for its intended readership.

Is there anything about building publicity for a book that aspiring authors should be aware of?

I wrote a recent Substack article on exactly this. In short, book publicity is a slow, steady climb filled with more “no’s” than “yeses” (in that sense, it’s not dissimilar to being on submission or in the querying trenches). There is an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes work and negotiation that authors never see. Most publicists pour their hearts into hundreds of pitches over the course of a campaign, and only a small fraction of those emails receive a response. Fewer still result in coverage.

That said, I encourage aspiring authors to remain steadfast in getting their stories into the world. If you have a publicist, think of that relationship as a true partnership. Communicate clearly. Lead with patience. Ask questions whenever they arise. Most importantly, embrace every opportunity that comes your way—whether it’s a digital Q&A, an author essay, or an Instagram Live interview—because even the smallest opportunities contribute to the slow build of a book’s visibility and cultural cachet.

How do you make time for writing?

Between an active social life, multiple jobs, wedding planning, fitness, and everything else, I often ask myself the same question! I find moments to write whenever I can—on the treadmill at the gym, during lunch breaks, or even on my daily subway commute.

Whenever an idea truly takes hold, though, I’m intentional about setting everything else aside to give it the time and attention it deserves. It also helps that I am living in the creative playground that is New York. There are creative people everywhere you look who will push you to match their stride, as well as spaces that champion the creative process (libraries, cafés, parks, writing groups, museums galore, literary events, etc.).

What’s one writing class, book, or other resource that has been influential to your development?

In high school, I took a gothic literature class with a brilliant English teacher who recognized my love of the macabre and introduced me to the rich literary tradition behind it. I also credit much of my creative ethos to Stephen King’s memoir On Writing. Say what you will about him, but he knows how to tell a story.

What’s one writing accomplishment you’re proud of?

Completing my creative writing thesis during the height of COVID was an incredibly intense, concentrated experience. I was essentially locked away in my turret dorm room, writing day in and day out to finish the earliest iteration of my debut before the deadline.

What made the experience even more meaningful was that my thesis advisor—a fantastic writer in her own right—told me at the outset that she wasn’t a fan of genre fiction and that earning her support would take a great deal of work. When she ultimately praised the novel, it was a feeling unlike any other.

What are you working to accomplish next?

My primary goal is to finish another novel while my debut is on submission. The reality is that many novels don’t sell on submission, and I want to maintain my momentum—and my love of writing—regardless of what happens to There’s Nothing Wrong with Erik Heart.

The new project has been an absolute joy to write. Whereas my debut is set in my hometown of Seattle, Washington, my current novel is set in New York City and feels very much in conversation with my present life, while Erik Heart was in conversation with my past.

Hannah Zee Klein is represented by Dani Leshgold at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Find her on Substack and Instagram @hannahzeeklein.

What other questions do you have for Hannah? Comment below!

Both of us have been working on essay collections for some time now, and in the spirit of “Work in Progress,” the title of this Substack, I recently got the idea to interview writers who have not published a book yet and are actively trying to get careers off the ground. For me, it can be helpful to hear from people who are closer to my level rather than always looking for advice from established authors. I had this conversation with Elise before this Substack note took off, and I’m excited to develop this into a new weekly series titled “Author in Progress.” I’ve gotten a lot of messages from writers at different stages with interesting perspectives to share. More to come soon!

Excited to kick this off with a good friend. Elise and I talked about navigating writing post-MFA, securing income, figuring out what kind of writers we are, and more.

Lizzie Lawson: It has now been four years since I graduated from OSU and three years since you graduated, which feels like a long time when I think about it like that. I’m sure there’s more I would have wanted to accomplish in four years, but I can see logically how I’ve worked at the pace I needed to.

For me the transition from MFA to “real life” was difficult financially and emotionally. There was the problem of stringing together jobs while I tried to find steady teaching opportunities. For about six months, I juggled a grading gig, a website gig (much more administrative than it sounds), a tutoring gig, and a data entry gig for a start-up that is no longer.

Then there was the emotional side of it. Being accepted into OSU had felt like an amazing accomplishment, and while I was there, it felt like I had “arrived” in a sense. I was surrounded by peers and professors who were as obsessed with literature as I was, and we were all trying to build artist lives. After graduating, I felt like I had to prove myself again and like I needed something to show for my time in grad school. It seemed like none of my friends or family with corporate jobs understood my life.

What was the transition like for you?

Elise Gorzela: It feels very freaky that I’ve been back in New England now for the same amount of time that I lived in Ohio.

The transition after the MFA was rough jobwise. I applied to over 100 jobs (that is not exaggerating) for retail, teaching, grant writing, an assistant at a news station, and a Quaker high school teacher. I got three interviews and while the Quaker high school told me it came down to someone with more experience and I should reapply if I see an opening, most places I never heard a word back from. It was a week before my lease ended, packing boxes in my bedroom and trying not to panic that I didn’t have a place to actually move to, when I got a call from an English department head at a state university asking if I was still interested in adjuncting. I tried to act very calm and not desperate and said, “Yes, I would still be interested.”

Since the MFA I’ve had to scramble together a bunch of jobs when I can, like adjuncting at two different colleges, online grading (thanks for the reference Lizzie!), and sometimes picking up shifts at a nearby grocery store for extra cash. All that financial stuff is stressful and takes up space in my life that used to be made available for writing while in the MFA.

I agree being accepted into an MFA felt like arriving in a way. Before the MFA I worked at a liquor store for years and the acceptance to OSU was the first time I was told YES as a writer. I feel that pressure now that I need something to show for it. I think I assumed I’d leave OSU with a bunch of publications and a finished book ready to be put onto shelves. But I’m very proud of the two publications I’ve gotten after graduating and my book in progress now resembles very little of what my thesis was. I’m glad I’ve given it this amount of time to morph into something different.

LL: I went through a ton of apps after I moved back to Minnesota too. I interviewed for temp jobs that paid little and gave off bad vibes, just to see if I could gain some skills. A lot of this is probably the nature of the job market in general, but I did feel less employable after grad school than before.

In some ways, I’m glad I didn’t worry about that stuff before getting an MFA. I’ve always had this romantic idea about being a starving artist and just making it work so I have as much time as possible to write. It can be depressing to live that way when I’m unsure if I’m going to be offered classes the next term or when the math is just not mathing, but when everything does line up, I’m like, oh, I really get to write at a coffee shop this morning and then read a couple of student essays. I remember our professor Michelle Herman being like, “all you need is enough to live.” I think about that a lot.

I also like that you mentioned needing time for your work to morph. Once I was talking to a current MFA student and I said something like, “I think the real work begins after the program is over.” She looked horrified, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t have said it. But while getting an MFA gave me much-needed time and feedback, it was the years after where I experienced the leap I was looking for. It was like I gathered all this data in my brain, and when I was finally on my own and stopped writing for workshop, it suddenly clicked.

EG: I love that quote from Michelle. In class Michelle once had us write down a list of labels for ourselves (like roles we take on and/or personal identity) and she looked at my list and said, “Why didn’t you write down writer?!” It was the first time I was forced, and maybe felt confident enough, to call myself a writer.

My growth in the MFA really had to do a lot with confidence. I went in knowing I wanted to write personal essays, but I wasn’t really sure what my style was and had no idea of what I didn’t know. In Elissa Washuta’s form workshop, I read so many cool and interesting writers’ work which gave me permission to experiment with what an essay could be. That helped me grow in learning what kind of writer I am.

Workshop made me grow some thicker skin and learn how to sort through helpful criticism versus feedback that I should ignore (like “I skimmed this because I don’t get it”). While workshop did push me forward, it is also one of those things I’m glad to be done with. Outside of the MFA, I feel similar to what you said where I have all this data and now I can run with it. I’m not writing with workshop in mind, but experimenting and taking risks on my own time. I’ve learned what my writing routine looks like not on a grad school schedule.

A big thing I gained during the MFA is finding community I trust. Meeting with you and Shawna (our other writing partner) weekly on zoom is so helpful to talk about writing, what we’re working on, and tips for helping each other with the more professional nonwriting-writing stuff like query letters.

LL: I like how you said workshop helped you figure out what kind of writer you are. I can definitely relate. I’m curious what kind of writer you used to see yourself as versus what kind of writer you are now.

When I started out, I was trying to mimic more experimental essays I loved—essays with titled sections, essays that make a collage out of a place or time (like this essay from Brevity), or essays with a lot of white space. While I still love reading essays like this, I realized my strengths lie less in lyricism and gaps and more in narrative storytelling. Writing narrative seemed daunting to me, but when I finally embraced it, things felt more natural.

EG: I had the flipped experience. I was trying to write essays that had a straightforward narrative, lining up events in order to make sense of them. I always loved James Baldwin's advice about wanting to write a sentence "as clean as a bone," and I wanted my essays to feel like that too. But my writing (and my thinking) tends to be more messy. You let me borrow your copy of The Chronology of Water once and I fell in love with this quote from Lidia Yuknavitch: “Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.” Writing an essay like a river with dozens of tributaries shooting off feels more natural to me and creates the possibilities to discover during the writing process more exciting.

LL: That quote is beautiful, and it really resonates with what I love about Lidia Yuknavitch as both a writer and teacher since I took a 12-week class with her. One of the ways she helped strengthen my writing was by pointing out parallel objects, symbols, and language that were popping up in my writing so that I could pay attention to them and look for ways to build upon them.

Also love the Baldwin quote. Your sentences do feel “clean as a bone.”

Another question I have is what are you doing now to balance work and a writing practice? How do you stay motivated/keep growing as a writer? You don’t strike me as someone who holds herself to a strict schedule, but it also seems like you’ve written a lot in the last couple years.

EG: I definitely don’t keep a strict schedule. I’ve tried to create routines for myself, but I never stick to them long. Part of that is because of being an adjunct. My work schedule changes every four months, so I have to re-find gaps in my schedule that I can set aside for writing. I used to think I needed specific circumstances to write (a whole day with nothing to do, absolute quiet, in isolation in my room), but I’ve found in recent years that I can really write anywhere anytime. I find 15 minutes between classes (if my students aren’t hounding me) or while eating breakfast before running out the door. My grandmother, who loved reading and writing, told me that whenever something pops in your mind to write it down, no matter what. That gave me a mindset that writing is always there, so when something clicks while doing the dishes, I pay attention to it. I’ve got Notes app pages and journals full of half formed thoughts and sentences that I return back to.

I’ve also found that I can’t write in the summer. Maybe it’s the weather and wanting to be outside instead of on my computer, or the school mindset of summer=no work, but I find it difficult to work on anything new. I save the summer for revision, reading, and mostly a break from writing. I used to feel guilty about that, but I find that my writing does need that time. I may not be actively writing, but I am thinking through ideas. They’re always in the background marinating. When the weather starts to get crisp in the fall, I get a flood of new ideas for projects and motivation to write for long stretches.

LL: That’s such a helpful message, that you can keep up your practice in small pockets of time. If I have no time to write, I’ll journal on my couch at the end of the day with some bullet points about whatever project I’m in the middle of. It can sometimes lead to better ideas than what I come up with in a full day of writing.

My productivity also changes with the seasons. I feel most productive in the winter because I’m staying inside and I get fresh motivation from the new year. It seems to slowly taper as the year goes on until fall when I write the least. If I am writing in the fall, it’s like I’m shedding my bad ideas with the falling leaves. Historically, my fall writing never turns into anything.

I have loved doing this convo with you, and I feel like I’m getting to know you better even though we’re writing partners. To close out our convo, is there any advice you’d give someone who wants to write a book of essays but feels intimidated by the process and amount of time it would take?

EG: It feels weird giving advice for something I haven’t finished myself, but I do think the amount of time I’ve spent (whether the current book I’m working on gets published or not) has been worth it. You have to approach it in pieces; there’s no way the whole thing will just arrive perfect in a short amount of time. I was in Quebec this past weekend with my family and met a cousin, Fabienne Rancourt, who is an artist. She showed us her studio, which was a small cabin on her family’s farm, where she had her paintings in progress and sculptures, a small bed, and a desk cluttered with paint tubes and palettes. It was amazing to see where she creates and reminded me that it is the process of creating that is the enjoyably challenging part. Giving yourself a dedicated space to make a mess and see what comes of it is what’s needed to tackle something huge like writing a book. Creating is hard work so you got to do it because you love it.

I’ve really enjoyed doing this with you! It’s always inspiring and illuminating to speak with you about writing.

Elise Gorzela is an essayist from New England currently teaching at Worcester State University. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University. Her work can also be found in DIAGRAM, The Audacity, and March Danceness 2024.

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Slate, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more. I teach frequent writing workshops online. My full class list can be found here.

In response to an Instagram post about the essay I recently published in Slate (about how my involvement in a friend’s wedding soured our friendship), I received the above comment, asking whether I was worried about offending the friend in question.

This is a common question writers get asked, and I think it’s because the asker has their own friends and family in mind. They’re wondering what would happen if they were as honest, risking criticism or hurt feelings from people in their lives. Maybe they’re afraid to share or even begin their own writing projects because of this. Being a writer of essays and memoir means my name is attached to pieces about my real life that will always be out there, some of which might make people in my past or present uncomfortable. Once something is published in a magazine, you can’t control who reads or shares it. You can’t take it down. That’s a real concern writers need to think deeply about before they publish.

I write about relationships a lot—particularly friendship

I’ve been publishing my work off and on for almost ten years, and I’ve thought about this question a lot, especially since I’ve realized that friendship is one of my literary obsessions. There are four essays in my collection in which friendship is a major aspect of the piece, and I’ve published a few things in lit mags that intersect with the subject as well.

Besides the Slate piece, my most recent friendship essay was “How to Keep Guys Interested” in The Florida Review (only in print atm). It’s about having exactly one friend at the beginning of high school and spending every weekend at her house, getting dating advice from her college-aged sister, watching Cruel Intentions, and stalking boys on MySpace.

Back in 2018, I published “When We Were Friends” in The Rumpus about a college friend group that felt intense and volatile. Now it has evolved into a much longer essay in my book, titled “Auras.”

Then, in 2019, I published “First Apartment (St. Paul, 2013)” in The Santa Ana River Review about my college roommate, our shitty apartment, and us both going through breakups at the same time. In retrospect, I might have had a crush on her.

You may notice all of these examples are of past friendships. I was writing about people who are no longer in my life in a meaningful way. This was also true for the friendship I wrote about in the Slate piece. I wasn’t going to coffee with a friend one day then turning around and writing about them the next. Because of this, I was able to write openly without worrying about impacting the relationship, because we didn’t have one.

This made it easier, but it wasn’t the only factor I considered. It also doesn’t mean I’d never write about someone currently in my life—that’s just a bit more delicate.

So how do I approach this question?

I have a few personal guidelines I follow when writing about other people. Of course, this varies from writer to writer.

First, analyze the relationship. In Body Work, Melissa Febos says something like, expect people to react the way you’ve seen them react to uncomfortable things in the past. If they are someone who blows up, expect them to blow up. If they avoid hard things, expect them to avoid the subject. If they’re easy-going, they might not care at all. I typically don’t run a draft by a person unless it’s a very close relationship, like my husband.

Write from your own perspective. I don’t share other people’s stories that are their own to tell without explicit permission. I only shared the facts of my own experience and how I felt. I don’t speak for anyone but myself.

Change names. Another name never feels quite as fitting to a person, but I almost always change names. The only exceptions are for close relationships like my siblings and husband, who I’m running the piece by anyway, or if the specific name is important to the piece (there’s one name I didn’t change in The Florida Review piece for this reason).

DON’T write for revenge. Trust me, anything you write out of spite is going to be less interesting than the deeper, more complicated story.

The important question is, can I stand behind this? Even if the writing upsets someone, will I still feel okay with the work I did and the care I put into it?

Writing About Relationships Class

Of course, the challenge in writing about friendships and other relationships goes beyond the question of ethics. There’s so much to consider in order to do it well, like how to create characters from real people, how to write realistic dialogue, how to handle many characters at once, and how to write about relationships that span decades of time.

That’s why I’m excited to offer a 4-week class, Writing about Relationships in Personal Essays and Memoir, starting August 3rd! It’s fully online, asynchronous with short video lectures, readings, writing prompts, and feedback on up to 10 double-spaced pages of writing. This class is great for anyone writing about parents, romantic partners, siblings, friends, enemies, and more. You can work from your own time zone, whenever is convenient for you.

In this course, students will:

• Discover techniques that bring characters to life

• Discuss the ethics of writing about real people (with insights from established authors)

• Read published essay examples from acclaimed nonfiction writers

• Generate an essay up to ten pages

• Receive instructor feedback

If you want to learn more about Writing Workshops, the org I’m running the class through, and what students have accomplished over the years (including signing agents, publishing books, and winning prizes), the founder Blake Kimzey recently talked about it on this podcast. You can also drop me any questions you have in the comments!

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Slate, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

I’m excited to offer a 4-week class, Writing about Relationships in Personal Essays and Memoir, starting August 3rd! This class is great for anyone writing stories that involve parents, friends, romantic partners, siblings, archenemies, and more. It’s online, asynchronous, meaning you can work at your own pace, according to your own schedule. Each week, I’ll provide short video lectures, readings, and writing prompts. I’ll also give feedback on up to 10 double-spaced pages of writing.

In this course, students will:

• Discover techniques that bring characters to life

• Discuss the ethics of writing about real people (with insights from established authors)

• Read published essay examples from acclaimed nonfiction writers

• Generate one full essay up to ten pages

• Receive written instructor feedback on their draft

Speaking about writing about relationships…

Last week, I published this essay in Slate about being asked to serve, not as a bridesmaid, but as a “personal attendant” in a college friend’s wedding. If you’ve never heard of a personal attendant before, that’s because it appears to be specific to the upper Midwest—mainly Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. I got the idea for this piece because I was telling a writer friend about this terrible experience I had where, as the personal attendant, I drove 3 hours (both ways) to the bachelorette party in rural MN just for the afternoon, only to discover that all my college friends, who were bridesmaids, were invited to stay for the whole weekend. My writer friend had no idea what a personal attendant was, and after I explained it, she said “this could be an essay.” A year later, I actually put the piece together.

Here’s some behind the scenes of how the piece came about.

I started with a draft around 1,100 words that focused only on my story of being a personal attendant with a little explanation about the role. It did not include any of the interviews or research that appears in the final article. I polished the draft and sent it to Isabelle Kohn at Slate with the following pitch:

Less than a week later, Isabelle got back to me and asked if I could zoom out on the culture and history of personal attendants and weave in a few other people’s experiences rather than just my own. I immediately agreed even though I didn’t know how I was going to do this. I already knew from writing the first draft that there wasn’t a lot of information about where the concept of a personal attendant comes from, and I also didn’t know how I’d find any other personal attendants to interview.

Over the next few days, I texted my sisters to see if they knew anyone, posted to Facebook wedding groups, and emailed a bunch of local wedding planners. At first, I only found people who had positive experiences as PAs, and I lost sleep worrying that the people with the more dramatic stories wouldn’t want to speak to me. Finally, someone privately messaged me on Facebook and had a lot to say. That let me breathe a sigh of relief. Then I heard privately from more people as well.

Finding the history of personal attendants was even more tricky because it hasn’t been formally documented (not the way the history of bridesmaids has). I still have no idea why it doesn’t appear outside the upper Midwest. I reached out to a couple wedding historians who did not have knowledge on the subject. All I could do was search wedding announcements in newspaper archives to see when and where the term appeared.

By the time I finished the updated draft with these additions, the essay was closer to 1,800 words and felt a lot fresher and more expansive as a result. I was super grateful to Isabelle for giving me feedback and allowing me to revise it. I sent the piece back to Slate, and Isabelle did minimal line editing but kept almost everything the same. Even the headline I pitched wasn’t much different from the final product. And my personal attendant story was still the essay’s core.

Here’s an excerpt:

As the wedding party posed for photos outside the church, I hovered to the side, waiting for instructions. “Lizzie, can you grab the umbrellas?” a friend yelled when it started to drizzle. I returned damp and breathless with an armful of bubble umbrellas and took their bouquets so they had one arm free. I was the dedicated errand girl, included and excluded at the same time while they laughed in matching dresses, like Cinderella primping her stepsisters for the ball. Later, a toilet in the church bathroom refused to flush, and it was my job to track down paper and markers to make an “out of order” sign. After hurrying back to the group, I overheard my friends say they were sleeping at Joelle’s farm that night. My lungs deflated. I had booked myself a hotel room. Again, I wasn’t part of the inner circle.

This was my first time publishing to a wider audience, and I was fascinated by how much engagement it got. I died laughing at the comments.

Here are some of my favorites:

Honestly, I’d watch that movie.

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Slate, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

Though I’ve always viewed myself as a nonfiction writer, I had the opportunity to take workshops in fiction and poetry during my MFA, and the experience was extremely humbling and educational. Prior to those classes, I had never made up a character before or broken a line (in fact I still wrote mostly prose poems). My classmates watched me flounder about on the page until one or two things clicked. Here are some things I learned in each genre that can apply to other genres.

(originally published on Writing Workshop’s blog)

In Fiction, I Focused Tension Into Central Conflict

In essays, I often rested on “this actually happened” to justify stray details and less than clear conflict, but in fiction, I had to reflect on the purpose of each scene and moment of tension I included and how they built into the central story. Since everything is (supposedly) invented in fiction, it forced me to consider how each piece was earning its place in the story. I couldn’t just include details because they were true. I had to look more critically at the purpose each scene served and how they pushed the story forward.

In Fiction, I Flexed Character and Dialogue Muscles

In fiction, I invented characters, wrote from multiple perspectives, and inhabited points of view other than my own. I learned to how to bring out characters’ unique voices in sparse lines of dialogue and how to exaggerate their traits just enough. Having practiced this skill in fiction made it easier for me to showcase the sharpest characteristics and dialogue of the real people that appeared in my nonfiction. I described my people in more detail and found more opportunity for them to speak for themselves.

In Poetry, I Embraced the Strangest Details

Out of the three genres, I was most new to poetry, and I was surprised by how much it impacted my writing as a whole. One of the things my professor often said was to find a weirder detail or a stranger turn of phrase. In short lines of poetry, every word is on display—standing naked on a mostly blank page, it seemed to me. I already knew not to write in cliches, but there was even less room for any image or phrase that feels at all common. Readers want to be surprised, startled, and left turning over the sounds. Now in my prose, I’m more critical of my word choice, and I ask myself what stranger details I could include.

In Poetry, I Thought About Presentation and White Space

Being new to poetry, it was interesting to see how line length, spacing, and arrangement impacted the reading experience. Longer lines make the reading faster whereas white spaces create pauses. Line breaks aren’t typically used in prose, but you can be deliberate about sentence and paragraph lengths as well as the spaces between sections. Now, I consider where I want to speed up or slow down based on the emotion I’m conveying.

In Nonfiction, I Searched for Meaning

I also applied my nonfiction skills to fiction and poetry, which took some trial and error. Because I was practiced in analytical thinking in my nonfiction, I used this to take my fiction and poetry deeper, asking “so what?” and “why does this matter?” The way I answered those questions was different in each genre, but it helped me create more layers of complexity in my work.

In Nonfiction, I Drew From Life Experience

Being practiced in memoir and personal essay has made me comfortable drawing from my own life experience for inspiration. Excavating my memory also helped when I started writing fiction and poetry. In those genres, I found that I could approach my life experiences in different ways, through exaggeration, invented characters, and concise lines. I found that some of the memories I was struggling to bring into my nonfiction actually felt much more at home when used in another genre.

If you are able, I highly recommend trying out a class in a genre you are unfamiliar with. If not for the reasons above, it’s also a good exercise in doing something uncomfortable, and it’s a way to play around on the page without the pressure of getting published. This weekend, I’m taking a screenwriting class with the wonderful Lillie Garnder that’s 100% focused on dialogue, and I’m excited to become a dialogue writing master.

Currently reading: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Watching: Hacks Season 2

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

I hadn’t practiced the Catholic faith for four years at that point. I thought of myself solidly as a former Catholic and current agnostic. This was despite the fact that I went to Catholic school until eighth grade and attended a Catholic university, where I lived on the Catholic women’s floor of the dorms and studied abroad in Rome with seminarians. For years, I’d been keeping my loss of faith a secret from my parents. When they asked where I went to mass on Christmas, my husband and I would answer with a church close to our apartment, where no one knew my family. But as time went on, things got more awkward. The summer before, on a family lake trip, I told my dad I didn’t make it to Sunday mass because I had a stomach ache. Then my parents discovered I bought Tarot cards at a local bookstore, which led to my dad giving my husband a lecture on how he needed to show more “leadership” over me.

Lying about my lack of faith made it feel like something I was ashamed of when it wasn’t. After four years, I was finally comfortable not being religious, and I had worked through my past experiences, questions, and fears in the book of essays I was working on. My parents often asked what my book was about, but the closest I got to telling them was two years ago when I said, “my relationship to my faith.” My dad had nodded, pleased to think I was writing about the same faith I’d always had, the one bestowed upon me at birth.

Now, I wanted to own my own choices. I wanted to be known for who I was, without secrets. Hiding it was more for the benefit of my parents over myself. I knew my mom and dad, who made us pray together as a family every single night, would have a hard time with the news. Even if they already suspected I was slacking in my faith, telling them it was intentional would mean I was consciously betraying the values they brought me up in.

Before lunch with my mom, I took extra care with my appearance, wearing a sundress, jewelry, and foundation like a security blanket. At the cafe, we pondered the menus, and though I was too nervous to be hungry, I ordered a roast beef sandwich with sauteed peppers and onions.

We prayed after the food came. I picked at my sandwich while my mom told me about the ordination she had been invited to because she knew one of the new priests. She told me about the newly ordained men and the jokes they made about hearing confessions for the first time. The bread of my sandwich was soggy, and I tore it into pieces with a fork. I took small bites of meat while waiting for an opening in the conversation.

“I actually wanted to tell you something,” I said when there was a pause. Blood surged to my fingertips. I took a deep breath and reminded myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. “I’m not religious anymore.”

We stared at each other. My mom didn’t look surprised or upset, just uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable too.

“I’m not looking for anyone’s opinion. I’m fine with it, and I have my own reasons. I just wanted to update you,” I said.

My mom seemed to consider before speaking. “Do you want to share any of your reasons?”

I didn’t know how to say it without being disrespectful. There were too many reasons to count. There was the fact that only men could be priests and how often they condemned “homosexuality” from the pulpit. There was the way Catholicism taught me that birth control is “intrinsically evil.” There was the humiliation I felt in the confession booth and how, when I admitted to masturbating, the priest at my parish let out a sigh and asked “how often?” Over the years, mass had become something that made me feel angry and trapped. And that was only scratching the surface.

“I just had some things happen in my life that made me look at the world differently,” I said. “I don’t align with a lot of the things the church teaches anymore. There’s too much to get into—I mean, I’m writing a whole book about it.”

My mom nodded. She didn’t say anything affirming, but she also didn’t rush to tell me I was wrong. She said she would love to read the book if I was open to it, and I promised to show it to her in the future, once it was perfect.

“But you don’t have to read it,” I said. “It’s not meant for the family. It was more for me. Like, I needed to write it.”

Walking home from lunch, I had that particular sinking feeling of when you know you disappointed your parent. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a teenager getting punished or lectured anymore. It sucks to know your parent doesn’t approve of you, even if they are trying to be kind about it.

I clutched my tote bag and quickened my pace, thinking about how different my life was from my mother’s. At my age, my mother had four kids as a stay-at-home mom. That was the life the church demanded of women, but it was also the life she wanted. Instead of following this path, I moved to a different state and prioritized myself and my education. I connected with people outside our church bubble. I wrote a book. I gained confidence in the idea that life could look however I wanted.

I told myself to be proud for owning my choices, even if it didn’t feel good. Of course I wanted my mom to say she was proud me and that she admired the person I was becoming. I don’t think there ever comes a time when you stop wanting that. I remembered how a friend told me I could act as my own parent. I didn’t do anything wrong, I told myself. I was respectful. I don’t tell other people what to believe so why should anyone tell me?

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published in Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, The Sun, and more.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

Lena Dunham’s controversies have always interested me too. I followed her on Twitter and was an avid reader of Lenny Letter, her now defunct publication. I was strangely fascinated by her internet persona which was often unfiltered, cringey, TMI, and shockingly problematic at the same time. Some of her missteps include her 2016 comments about Odell Beckham and the time she defended a Girls writer against sexual assault allegations. Even when it was like watching a burning building, there was something about the way she kept responding and putting herself out there for public critique that I couldn’t turn away from. Maybe it was because, unlike her, I deleted Twitter posts if they got one angry reply.

In any case, it’s clear Lena Dunham can write, and this memoir, with the gift of time and self-awareness, is a strong, affecting piece of art. I devoured the behind the scenes details into the making of Girls and stories of living as a twenty-something starlet in New York and LA. I also found profoundness in its message about how taxing the entertainment industry can be, how illness can only be ignored so long, and how your dream life can turn you into someone you don’t recognize.

Memoir Writing Lessons from Famesick

(light spoilers)

Write about difficult things with levity

Dunham covers many harrowing topics in this memoir, including numerous illnesses and medical procedures, drug addiction, and heartbreak. The book could easily feel overwhelming and depressing, but Dunham writes through these moments with straightforward prose, giving us some emotion without wallowing in (deserved) self-pity. Her voice is puncuated with bites of humor (for example, she described her removed uterus as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”).

But also don’t turn away

At the same time, Dunham doesn’t hold back. She doesn’t spare the reader of details that could appear too gruesome or humiliating, and she writes through them without flinching. Even so, she also avoids content that feels gratuitous or overly TMI (unlike criticisms of her first book, Not That Kind of Girl). In Famesick, the harder and more intimate moments are necessary to the memoir’s journey.

Understand your own motives, especially when they seem nonsensical

A main tension in Famesick is about Dunham overworking herself on Girls and medicating to keep her body in check. Not only was she the writer, director, and lead actor on an HBO show at the age of twenty-five, responsible to hundreds of adults who relied on her for a paycheck, but the sheer magical luck of this fact made Dunham feel pressure to give time and resources to any struggling artist who asked. As a result, she way over-extended herself by accepting requests she never should have and never allowing herself time off, much to the confusion and dismay of her parents. It was important to understand this tension between the obvious fact that she needed a break and why she continued to wage war on her body instead.

Leave room for complication

Many of the headlines following Famesick’s release have been about Dunham’s relationship with Adam Driver. News sources center on moments in which he threw a chair at a wall, but what struck me about their relationship in the book was how much more nuanced it was. It seemed like two opposite people with passion and admiration, struggling to understand one another. Dunham portrays Driver’s personality as perplexing, like, for example, when they watched the Pilot of Girls together then Driver left without saying a word. When they parted ways after the show ended, they agreed they would always love each other and everything happened as it was supposed to.

Give the book everything it needs

A surprising tension in Famesick is the relationship between Dunham and her showrunner, Jenni Konner. Dunham describes Konner as her best friend through most of the book, though it becomes clear that Konner cared about Dunham only insofar as she’d make her money. I won’t go too much more into it, but this felt like one of the most genuinely heartbreaking pieces of the book. Dunham says she almost didn’t include Konner in Famesick, writing, “It took me many drafts to even type Jenni’s name in this manuscript—the book was full of stories that made little sense without her presence, were missing some essential seed or spark because I felt I could not include her. Ultimately, it became clear I was going to have to choose—between telling an honest story and avoiding any mention of her.”

One thing I wanted to see more of…

Dunham gives off the vibe that she sees everything written about her online (even referencing the famous Lorde and Jack Antonoff PowerPoint). The book often mentions how internet people called her fat and ugly, but she doesn’t take ownership over her real controversies (other than her defense of the accused Girls writer, which she claims Konner persuaded her to write the day after a surgery). It would have been interesting to see more of a differentiation between right-wing hate and fair criticism instead of lumping them together and calling it all “the internet.”

Currently Reading: Deliver Me by Elle Nash

Watching: Hacks. I also recently watched Tiny Furniture for obvious reasons.

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my essays have been published places like Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, and The Sun.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

“I don’t want to do it,” I said of the proposal. “But I will.”

I made a maniacal expression to convey that I was a psycho who would jump through any hoops necessary to achieve my goals. A proposal, though tedious and time-consuming, is within my capabilities as is the rest of the non-writing stuff I need to get serious about. I’ve already written one entire book, so why let these hurdles stop me? I just need to get myself to do it.

The hardest thing that keeps me from pushing forward is the uncertainty that my efforts will lead anywhere. I could do everything I’m supposed to do, but I still don’t know what my future will look like. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish a book or find stability in the academic job market, and that’s scary to admit. I don’t have a career that comes with regular inflation raises and a solid upward trajectory. I get a lot of follow-up questions when I tell people what I do for a living. But I chose this life with no assumptions that it would be easy, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything else.

Sometimes, though, the precariousness, the uncertainty of finding even the smallest success, makes it hard to open a new document and roll up my sleeves. For years, I’ve been operating on blind hope, scraping together writing time between day jobs, printing endless drafts, clearing my social calendar for more work time. It takes stamina to keep that blind faith going and celebrate small wins that probably don’t mean a lot to 99% of people. Most of my life’s work is hidden in my head and on my hard drive (though I’m working to change that). For how ambitious and career-driven I am, sometimes my career feels fake.

My husband loves endurance sports, and recently we were watching the new documentary about Jessie Diggins, an Olympic cross country skier from Minnesota. Her best event is the 10k (6.2 miles), which she skied in 23 minutes and 39 seconds in the 2026 winter Olympics with bruised ribs, receiving bronze. In the doc, she described her superpower as being able to withstand pain. She pushes herself so hard during races that afterwards she drops to the ground and gasps for air like her lungs can’t hold enough of it. My husband has explained to me that endurance is about pain management, which is more mental than physical. It’s about pushing your body to to go harder when it’s screaming at you to stop.

Even though I did cross country in high school, I was never much of an endurance athlete. I chose the shortest running routes and took a lot of walk breaks to chat with friends. My favorite part of the sport was carbo-loading before meets. When I did run, I got quickly winded and felt like each step would be my last, though I could eventually run three or four miles in a practice. Gradually, I got faster and more in shape, but running never got more comfortable. I didn’t have shin splints or any other physical ailment holding me back, and it was physically possible for me to push myself faster and further than I was going. There was nothing stopping me from running a whole marathon if I wanted to. It was a question of how much pain I could mentally withstand.

After watching the documentary, I got to thinking about how a career in writing is also an exercise of endurance. I have to manage the pain of uncertainty, financial insecurity, and rejection longer than is comfortable. I have to outlast the precariousness. I have to tolerate it longer than I think I can. It’s more mental fortitude than talent.

And why shouldn’t I stick it out? At this point, I’m in deep enough that it would be an equally herculean effort to do anything else with my life. You’re in this, I’ve been whispering to myself. So run all out. Go crazy. Keep feeding a writing life that brings you joy and manifesting good things. Leave nothing on the table. There’s one aspect of this life I can control: myself, doing the work.

Anecdotally, the writers who make it are the ones who don’t give up. As Alexander Chee wrote in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, “The difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it.” In Thrill Me, Benjamin Percy wrote about his short story that received thirty-nine rejections before eventually being published and listed as one of the “100 Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories. Percy says, “Every time an editor says no it’s like a fist to the face. But you’ve got to see though the blood—you’ve got to keep breathing raggedly through those broken ribs—you’ve got to remember the thirty-ninth rejection.”

If this is your path in life, like mine, I want you to go the distance. It is within your abilities to write the book, find the people who are your truest audience, give yourself as much time as you need to flourish. This business can be heartbreaking and unfair, but dammit, I will spend my one precious life being brave. I’m going to do the annoying things, like the proposal, so I can continue to write my essays, so my words can be found by other people, so hopefully I can make connections on a human level. I prefer failure to the version of me who didn’t see this through.

Some reflection prompts for you:

• What would you start doing today if you knew you would be wildly successful?

• How long would you give yourself to work on that thing without external reward (assuming the reward is coming)?

• What are the barriers holding you back? For each one, list why/how you can overcome it.

Currently reading: Famesick by Lena Dunham; Next up: The Disappointment by Scott Broker

Watching: I Love LA and Survivor; Avoiding: Euphoria until curiosity gets the best of me.

*Despite the fact that there are em-dashes and colons in this newsletter, I do not use AI to write Work in Progress. My writing is my own.

I’m Lizzie, a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my work has been published places like Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, and The Sun.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

Only a few days left to sign up for my online Flash Nonfiction Generator on April 25th! Come write with me and learn how to make a deep impact in few words. Whether you’re curious about flash nonfiction, looking for inspiration, or want to develop short-form skills that pay off in any kind of writing, this class is generative and open to all levels.

I share more about the class in this interview with Writing Workshops.

I wrote three drafts of my essay collection before I touched the final essay. There was one point when I thought I was writing the final essay, though it eventually got split into the first essay, penultimate essay, and scraps that would become the final essay. But I took each essay through multiple revisions before I took a serious look at the ending.

This was partially strategic and partially delusion. I didn’t want to write the ending if I didn’t know exactly what the beginning and middle would look like. I also assumed that the final essay would flow naturally from my fingertips because I set myself up for success with rest of the book and because every once in a while I’d jot down some ideas in a file. So I kept shoving the task aside for later-me.

When I eventually sat down to write the draft, though, I found myself at the excruciating beginning of any writing process, not knowing the structure, the arc, the tone. And the final essay was even more challenging because it had to do all the things a good ending does—create the emotional payoff, feel logical but not obvious, and provide resolution without being too resolved.

After days of clutching my head in my hands, wandering around my house, and doom-scrolling, I decided to reread the final essays of some of my favorite collections for guidance.

“On Becoming an American Writer” from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

This was the first book I thought of when I decided to tackle this exercise, and revisiting this essay made me want to reread the entire book. A lot has changed since I read it in 2018, and I feel like I’d appreciate it even more now. “On Becoming an American Writer” is about what it means to write and make a living within America’s politics and failed systems. It touches on teaching after the 2016 election, writing after losing a friend to AIDS, and reading his first book review in New York days after 9/11. It questions how to continue loving what we do and uplifting the next generation of writers when we have no money for healthcare and struggle to afford our basic needs. It’s explores the role of words in the face of deep injustice. Following essays that reckon with Chee’s identity as a Korean American, gay man, artist, activist, and teacher, this was the perfect, nuanced ending, offering readers a “why this matters” and “what do we do now” that resists a neat answer.

“The Man Who Famously Inspired This Essay” from Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin

This was one of the first books that made me want to write an essay collection and a big inspiration for the chronological organization I landed on. The final essay is about Martin’s relationship with her emotionally manipulative father who left in her youth and resurfaced in adulthood to criticize everything about her. At the same time, it’s about Martin’s grandmother’s death, which fractured the family and resulted in Martin’s cousin’s inexplicably blocking her on Facebook, leaving Martin heartbroken. As her father pesters her with calls and increasingly erratic emails, she decides to cut off contact, knowing it’s the same thing her cousin has done to her. Caca Dolce follows Martin’s coming of age as a writer and artist with a funny and self-aware look at her experiences growing up poor, navigating Tourette’s, and struggling for independence, and it felt right to end on a moment of Martin making her own decision to cut of her dad and learning to accept her family’s choices as separate from her own. This essay solidified that not everything has to be resolved or uplifting for a there to be satisfying emotional arc.

“On Murder Memoirs” from First Love by Lilly Dancyger

First Love is a book of essays on the profound and complex female friendships that have carried Dancyger through her life. At the center is Dancyger’s cousin Sabina, her “first love” and close companion until Sabina’s life was devastatingly cut short. The final essay is a meta piece on Dancyger’s decision not to write a murder memoir in response to her cousin’s death and a larger critique of the true crime genre. Here, Dancyger explicitly confronts the difficulty of writing about Sabina without “reducing her to another dead girl in a story about male violence.” Integrating books like The Red Parts, In Cold Blood, and Memorial Drive, she points out how true crime centers the murderer and investigator more than the victim, who often falls into a flattened archetype. She also explains the visceral horror that consumes her whenever she gets close to the facts of her cousin’s death. “On Murder Memoirs” gets at a question that was hovering over the book—why a book about friendship rather than a book about murder? This tender, reflective collection couldn’t have ended any other way.

“Abandon Me” from Abandon Me by Melissa Febos

I had to include this book because, at 150 pages, its final essay is more than half the book. Abandon Me explores love, addiction, identity, and abandonment, incorporating literature and psychology with personal narrative. The final, title essay follows Febos’ tentative reconnection with her biological father alongside an all-consuming romantic relationship that caused Febos to abandon herself. The longer length allows Febos to deeply explore the meaning of “abandon.” For a while, I considered doing a novella-length essay at the end in similar fashion because I was having a hard time separating different but related ideas, but I didn’t have one clear storyline to pull throughout the piece.

“Goodbye to All That” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

I was surprised when I revisited this book because I didn’t realize this iconic essay was the ending. I read this as an undergrad in a creative nonfiction class, and Didion made me think being an essayist would be a very cool thing to do. Taking a closer look, I understand why “Goodbye to All That” needed to be at the end. So much of this collection is about illusion and loss and clinging to dreams that are falling apart. In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion turns her gaze inward to her arrival in New York City, complete with ambition, wonder, and a sense of possibility. As the years pass, she grows aware of the toll New York has taken on her, the loneliness, exhaustion, and disenchantment. While so much of Slouching Towards Bethlehem looks outward at journalistic subjects, this ending on Didion’s own goodbye and loss of belief in a place gives the book a personal self-awareness.

“Ordinary Girls” from Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz

This one is short, less than two pages long, and reads like a lyrical epilogue that elegantly bookends the book’s opening. Ordinary Girls is a memoir about growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami as Diaz’s mother battled schizophrenia. A bright throughline in the book follows Diaz’ group of friends who were in similar circumstances and how they supported one another, running wild on Miami Beach and sleeping on lifeguard stands. This titular ending recounts where Diaz’s group of friends, now women, ended up, mourning the ones who didn’t make it. The final lines zooms out to address the girls the author writes for—“For the girls they were, for the girl I was, for the girls everywhere who are just like we used to be. For the black and brown girls. For the girls on the merry-go-round making the world spin. For the wild girls and the party girls, the loudmouths and troublemakers. For the girls who are angry and lost. For the girls who never saw themselves in books.” It’s a breathtaking ending that expands outward while grounded in Diaz’s experience.

This exercise cemented a few things for me. 1) The ending can be short or long, but it has to hold something central to the work. Maybe it’s a question that was hovering above the collection or a story that closes out the book’s themes, but the ending has to resonate with what has come before in a way that’s profound and resolute but not repetitive. 2) A lot of endings turn outward, peering beyond the writer’s own story, but they don’t have to. It depends on what the story needs, like how Didion turns inward and Febos continues braiding personal story with philosophical texts as she did in earlier essays. Lastly, 3) lean into complication and nuance. None of these essays provided neat endings with everything tied up and resolved. They did, however, explore questions deeply and leave readers with a broader understanding of their subjects.

I didn’t leave this exercise with an exact understanding of how to tackle my own final essay, though I did gather a framework of different approaches. I still had to find my own ending myself.

I’m sure there are a bunch more essay collections that could have been on this list. If you have a favorite, please share in the comments!

My Flash Nonfiction Generator is coming up on April 25th! It will be held online through Writing Workshops. We’ll explore the art of flash (essays under 1,000 words), read examples, and generate three essay drafts. Participants will leave with additional readings and prompts to try on their own.

My full list of upcoming classes can be found here.

Here’s what a student recently said about their experience in a past class: “Lizzie provided an atmosphere of creativity and openness within the vulnerable space of a writing class. She always provided sincere feedback, and her leadership led to respectful and useful feedback from the other participants. I left the class feeling inspired to continue on my writing journey!”

One year ago, I thought I was close to finishing my essay collection (though it would actually take another year), so I attended a publishing conference in Minneapolis. Believing I was close to the querying stage, I wanted to collect as much publishing information as possible, even though I knew I should wait until the book was fully complete. I felt so close and eager to make something happen.

The conference had panels about writing craft, querying, and marketing along with agent and editor Q&A sessions and a live critique of writers’ first pages. There were a dozen or so agents who were available for 10 minute pitches as well as the opportunity to get query letters and sample chapters critiqued. All of it costed money.

I signed up for almost everything, including:

• a 10 min pitch with an agent

• a 10 min pitch with an editor at an indie press

• a query letter critique

• a first ten pages critique.

To prepare, I wrote a fresh draft of my query letter, which I hadn’t done since taking a “Professionalism” class in grad school. Rereading that old query, it made me emotional to see how far my project has come. Back then, I hadn’t yet discovered the beating heart of my manuscript, and now I can articulate it in my sleep. For the pitches, I memorized my new query letter and practiced with a timer to make sure there would be time to discuss after.

Here’s how everything went and what I learned in the process.

Pitch #1:

Before pitching, everyone waited in a nervous cluster outside the room full of agents, a nerve-racking place to be. Everyone was wringing their hands and clutching their conference folders to their chests. “I’ve never done this before,” another writer kept saying. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

I took deep breaths and repeated the first line of my pitch internally until it was my turn. This was my first pitch, and I had nothing to lose. Also comforting was that I was talking with a newer agent with only a few clients and maybe one deal.

I got to the table and launched into my memorized pitch. After the first few sentences, probably speaking too fast, I realized there was no way I was going to say everything I memorized. Already, the agent was ready to share her ideas. I ended up delivering just the hook, genre, length, main themes and arc, and a few comp titles.

The agent told me she connected to my story and shared a little about her own experiences. Then, instead of asking more about the book, she asked what I was doing to build a platform. This was, and continues to be, a dreaded topic for me. I told her I planned to focus on that over the summer by pitching articles, teaching workshops, and writing on Substack, and she seemed encouraged.

Next, she asked if I had a book proposal.

“I’ve written the whole manuscript,” I said.

“You’ll still need a proposal,” she replied and directed me to Jane Friedman’s book proposal template to learn how to write one.

The ten minutes were up. She gave me her card, and I left. I learned that my book concept was solid but that marketing was going to be almost more of a conversation than the book when it came to traditional publishing. I’d also been in denial about having to write a proposal along with the full draft, though I would remain in denial for some time after this.

Pitch #2:

My second pitch was with an editor at an indie press and my absolute dream publisher. This press has published many of my favorite authors and has a prestigious reputation in the literary world. I was glad to have done the first pitch as practice.

When I sat down with the editor, I mentioned some upcoming titles I was excited for then went into my abbreviated pitch. Like with the agent, it didn’t take much before the editor jumped in with her questions.

She asked me if I’d published any of the essays, and I said I had one coming out in The Florida Review. She asked about my writing style, essay structures, and what writers I would compare my voice to. The editor was trying to gauge the quality of my writing. I floundered, talking about “conversational intimacy” and “sense of inquiry” and integrating pop culture and philosophical texts. I wished I had prepared a more focused answer.

In the end, she told me to send her the three best essays from the book. Nothing ended up coming from this, but I was stoked at the time. It was eye-opening to see the different vibes between the agent and the indie editor in real time. Refreshingly art focused, the editor didn’t ask anything about marketing.

Query Critique:

I got my query feedback back a few weeks later and learned I would need to rewrite the entire letter. My query was too blow-by-blow. In an effort to accurately describe the book, I got too far in the weeds describing each essay rather than talking about the journey of the essay collection as a whole. This was a bummer to learn but also necessary.

First ten pages critique:

I got almost no feedback on the sample pages. The person critiquing them only gave me compliments, which was nice, but I had hoped for more insight on how the essay set the tone for the book and opportunities to deepen the threads. Maybe this person wasn’t that knowledgeable on personal essays and a first ten critique would be more helpful for a novelist or traditional memoirist. I don’t know, but I’ve gotten better feedback from writing friends and workshops I’ve taken.

All in all, I’m glad I attended. The pitches gave me confidence in my book concept and insights into what editors and agents would be looking for and what questions they ask. Now that I’m drafting the dreaded proposal, I’m keeping all of that in mind.

As a closing note, I’m making some changes to this newsletter! For two years, this has been a sporadic publication whenever I had the time. Now, I’m freshly inspired to see if I can build this into something consistent and cohesive, something with hooks.

From the beginning, I titled this Substack, “Work in Progress,” and I want to lean into that theme. Now that I’m in my thirties, I’ve learned I have to be happy in the life I have instead of waiting for a future where I’ve achieved all my goals. Work in Progress will be about process over product, slow efforts that yield results, and balancing joy alongside ambition. It will still focus on writing and publishing, but it will also delve into other aspects of life that I’m working through, including my relationship with the Catholic Church, which I touched on in a recent post and wrote an entire book about.

I’m so grateful for the community I’ve found on Substack. To anyone reading this, thank you for supporting my work!

If you’re new here, Hi! I’m Lizzie, an essayist, fiction writer, and teaching artist from Minneapolis, MN. I have an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, and my work has been published places like Electric Literature, The Florida Review, Passages North, and The Sun.

I teach frequent writing workshops online and in Minneapolis. My full class list can be found here.

Apparently, there are some writers who won’t write a sentence they don’t like, but I’m not one of them. When I’m writing a first draft, I go in with a loose outline but otherwise let myself be free and imaginative without worrying about whether it sounds good or makes sense to anyone but me. Then when I’m revising, I get serious about the sequence of events, characters, tone, meaning, word choices, and music of each sentence. I tinker with each decision I made during my free, imaginative draft, and the revisions often necessitate other revisions. During this process, I question everything. I usually also get feedback from other writers, so I’ll a mess of conflicting opinions in the mix.

It’s a lot to think about, and it can be hard to know where to begin. Having now gone through five revisions of my essay collection, I’ve tried a number of different strategies, and here are the ones that have worked for me.

Method 1: Cut up pages and reorganize them

Helps with structure and sequence of events. Helps identify gaps and discern whether each section keeps the story moving.

What I do is print the draft single-sided and lay it out so I can see the whole thing. I cut up the pages and test out new arrangements until I have a new organization I’m happy with. I scrawl notes in the margins and scribble things out. Then I tape the cut up pieces together in the new order and post the final product above my desk.

After that, I sit at my desk and stare up at the taped-together pages for an ungodly amount of time, dreaming up ideas for transitions and how I want the pacing to work. I stare at it until it feels like I can hold the whole essay in my head. Hopefully then I feel prepared to open the document in my computer and make the same changes there.

Method 2: Write thought-bubbles in the margins

Helps clarify the characters’ thoughts and feelings so I can make them clear on the page.

I got this idea from Lidia Yuknavitch in one of her workshops through Corporeal Writing, and it’s a game-changer.

I start by widening the right-side margin of the document and printing off a fresh copy. Working paragraph by paragraph, moment by moment, I write everything the characters think and feel. Then I go through and ask if those thoughts and emotions are present in the text.

Sometimes in nonfiction it feels like the emotion should be obvious to the reader, like you shouldn’t have to explain this made me sad when you’re writing about your childhood traumas, but you actually do have to explain this. The reader needs to feel what you feel in order to be engaged. I look for artful ways to translate the emotion to the text thought bodily reactions (like elbows clamped to sides, tearing the napkin into tiny pieces, etc.)

Method 3: Write about my work in progress

Helps with clarifying goals and intentions, finding the core of the project, and figuring out how to get to the next stage.

For this, I answer a series of questions about my writing project as if I’m simply journaling.

• Why do I want to write this?

• What do I want readers to understand?

• What excites me most about this project?

• What do I still need to figure out?

The trick is I have to write longhand, stream-of-consciousness answers to get to the deeper ideas that aren’t front of mind as I’m focused on all the nitty-gritty things to do with my draft. I do this when I’m feeling stuck or when writing feels like pulling teeth because it doesn’t feel like I’m actually working on the draft, even though my answers to the questions inevitably end up somewhere in it.

Method 4: Eke out more sensory detail

Helps with the reader feel immersed in the setting.

What I do is imagine myself in the place I’m writing about—in my parents’ kitchen, in my high school hallways, in my freshman dorm—and make a bulleted list of everything I see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. I list as many sensory details as I can come up with, whether they feel important or not. Through the process of dumping as many details as possible, I end up uncovering more distinct or strange details that wouldn’t have automatically come to mind. Then I go back into the draft with the sole intention of trying to insert as many of these details as possible, especially ones that fit the tone I’m going for.

Method 5: Write a potential thesis statement on a sticky note

Helps pull the core ideas of the project through from beginning to end.

Of course, creative writing doesn’t have a thesis statement the way academic writing does, but after years of teaching thesis statements to undergraduates, I started to imagine what my thesis statement would be for my creative projects if they had one.

Now, I can’t finish a project without distilling my main ideas into a succinct thesis that reflects the core tensions of my work. I’ll write the thesis statement on a sticky note and stick it to my computer as I’m revising. This way I can keep referring back to the core idea and make adjustments to the thesis as my project evolves. Every so often, I’ll go through each section of the piece and question how they contribute to the thesis. This has been the best way for me to find sections that don’t move the piece forward so I can cut or make changes.

That’s it! My only other piece of advice is BE PERSISTENT. Trust the process. Don’t settle for a decent draft when you know you can write an amazing one. Remember, each draft you do gets considerably easier.

What revision techniques do you return to?

Upcoming Class:

I’m offering my Flash Nonfiction Generator online this spring through Writing Workshops! It’s on Saturday April 25th, 2-5pm Eastern, and you’ll leave with three flash essay drafts and more prompts to try on your own.

To learn more about me and the class, check out my teaching artist interview. Here’s a snippet about why I created this class: “As a writer, the flash form challenges you to sharpen skills at the line level. A lot of the tools we use will make any piece of writing tighter and more engaging. Even when I’m writing a twenty-page essay, I want to be economical with my words.”

When I woke up, my teeth were normal. I shook off the dream and went to a coffee shop, a place I write at all the time, to work on the essay. I sat at the community table then spotted a picture on the wall that made me do a double-take. It was a black and white image of what looked like Jesus’ face. It was probably just any bearded man, but I sat there, scrutinizing it, wondering if it was new or if I hadn’t noticed it before. My arm hairs prickled as I got the familiar feeling that God was watching me.

I’m writing an essay collection about coming of age in and eventually leaving the Catholic Church, and my essay about Hell mainly focuses on spiritual gaslighting. From a young age, I was taught that the devil could manipulate my thoughts to lure me into darkness. I was encouraged to read The Screwtape Letters as if it was nonfiction, and my eighth grade religion teacher said it was a hard book to read because Satan would do anything to stop me from reading it. I learned to dismiss ideas that didn’t lead where my parents, Catholic school teachers, and priests wanted. My thoughts were not my thoughts. My choices were not a result of my own reason and decision-making but a response to temptations from an evil being. I didn’t question the faith because the tiny slivers of doubt in my mind didn’t come from me. They came from the devil.

Throughout the process of writing this book, and this essay especially, I’ve often felt God watching me, though I haven’t practiced any religion in years and no longer believe. Usually it happens when people sit near me at a coffee shop and talk about their faith. I’ve overheard earnest conversations about bible passages and deciphering signs from God as well as louder, performative conversations about proof that God exists or how there’s no purpose in life without God. Once, a college-age boy prayed over another boy right next to me. Another time, I opened my laptop to find someone had shoved a pamphlet of confession instructions inside.

I understand this is recency bias—I’m seeing God everywhere because I’m thinking intensely about him, like when I broke my ankle and suddenly noticed people on crutches everywhere I went. Still, every time something like this happens, it feels like the scene in Fleabag where the painting suddenly falls off the wall. God is sending me a message that he’s still here, that he sees what I’m writing. He’s warning me to course correct, go back to the person I used to be, the life I’m supposed to live. This used to put me on edge, and sometimes it’s still does. Lately, though, it feels like a rapport God and I have with each other. He nudges me on the shoulder every so often, and I roll my eyes, like “yes, I see you. I’m going to keep writing this. You know I’m going to keep writing this.” I turn back to my computer and continue where I left off, though the feeling that I’m disappointing him is still there.

That guilt is a big part of it. Subconsciously, I’m still worried I’m doing something wrong. Not only have I left the Catholicism, but I’m writing my own thoughts, which, as a woman raised in the church, I’m not supposed to have. I’m writing about the pressures, traumas, hypocrisies, and absurdities I experienced, and eventually, I’ll share this book with other people, which means potentially leading people astray. Even though Catholicism has caused me years of shame and turmoil, some of which I wrote about in Electric Literature, and this book points to deeper complexities rather than casting blame, it feels wrong to say anything negative. I have to remind myself I’m not crazy, it’s not all in my head. I’m allowed to not believe anymore. I’m allowed to share the literary essays I’ve spent years crafting in order to turn my experiences into art.

Still, God pokes at me. Even today, as I wrote “lure me into darkness” above, the light in my office flickered. Leaving a demanding religion is not as easy as not going to church anymore. I’ve had to untangle every teaching and reprogram myself not to let fear dictate my decisions. I became a writer because I want to finally say everything I’ve been suppressing. I want to stop questioning myself. I want to be rebellious. I want to nurture my thoughts to see where they lead.

Upcoming Class:

I’m offering my Flash Nonfiction Generator online this spring through Writing Workshops! It’s on Saturday April 25th, 2-5pm Eastern, and you’ll leave with three flash essay drafts and more prompts to try on your own.

To learn more about me and the class, check out my teaching artist interview. Here’s a snippet about why I created this class: “Some of my all-time favorite essays are less than a page long. As a writer, the flash form challenges you to sharpen skills at the line level. A lot of the tools we use to create effective flash essays will make any piece of writing tighter and more engaging. Even when I’m writing a twenty-page essay, I want to be economical with my words.”

Recent Reads:

• Soft Core by Brittany Newell is delightfully sensory and tender. I had no idea it would break my heart and mend it back together.

• Colored Television by Danzy Senna has the same page-turning quality of Caucasia and a fun humor in its messy and ambitious main character.

I’m sitting at Walden Coffee in Northeast Minneapolis on a Tuesday morning when a young Black man sprints past the windows outside. My head, along with every other head in the cafe, turns to see what he’s running from. There’s nothing there, but everyone’s heart rate has gone up a few decibels. “I think we’re all on high alert for that right now,” the woman next to me says. The baristas are talking about ICE. The group by the fireplace is talking about ICE. The older couple that just walked in are talking about ICE.

About a week after watching video of Renee Good’s murder that happened fifteen minutes from my house, I travel to Puerto Rico with my brothers and parents for a pre-planned family vacation. Sitting on the beach, I watch videos of ICE agents smashing car windows, kneeing people in the face, and breaking down doors. My neighborhood Facebook page reports abandoned cars with their lights still on. I carefully choose what I say around my conservative family members so I won’t completely turn them off to new ideas. After hiking in the rain forest, my mother tells me ICE has arrived in the tiny suburb I grew up in. I tell her how I moved classes online because ICE was harassing students on campus and how I’ll probably be online for all of spring for the same reason. “It’s just unsafe,” I say. “They’re arresting anyone based on skin color.” She kind of shakes her head sadly. “We have to fix our immigration system,” she says, a statement that seems receptive but could go either way.

On the way back to MSP airport, I hear on the news that ICE will be there. I rehearse three versions of what will yell at them, picturing the whole encounter in my head to summon the nerve. But I make it to the car without seeing them.

I see videos of ICE at my Target, at my Home Depot, at my gas station. I call big corporations and tell them to stop allowing ICE in their parking lots, in their hotels, in their rental cars. I boycott Target and Cub Foods and wonder where I’m supposed to buy laundry detergent. I scramble to adjust my lesson plans to Zoom in two days. I donate to GoFundMes for families who have been detained. Everywhere I go, I look for out-of-state plates, for multiple men in one car. I see neighborhood watch members posted at every block. Online, I watch people praise Mayor Frey for another press tour and beauty shot while he does nothing to protect his residents. I watch everyone refer to Renee Good and Alex Pretti as protesters (like it’s a dirty word) when they were just going about their lives on their own city blocks.

Someone I know’s close family member, a US citizen, is abducted. I find this out via family group text. Everyone responds that they are praying for his release, and my stomach fills with rage. “Don’t bother praying if you’re gonna turn around and keep voting for this,” I want to text back. I leave my phone in another room to stop myself from doing this, but I’m still seething. I wonder if I’m not handling this as maturely as I should. What does look like to handle fascism maturely?

Five days later, the person is released in Texas with none of his belongings. His family wants a white person to pick him up from the airport, and I volunteer. This is the world we’re in, where a white person is needed to get home safely from the airport. I picture the drive and go over scenarios of what to do if ICE stops me. I’d only open my window a crack so they couldn’t stick their arm inside. I’d film everything. I’d ask if I was free to go. I cannot fail this man and his family. They find another white person who’s closer to them, so I am not needed.

On Friday, Minnesotans bundle up in snow pants, scarves, and double layers of mittens to protest downtown for the second week in a row. Estimates say 100k people came out both days, in temperatures of -20 and 6. The population of Minneapolis is only 430,000. Someone in our group says it feels like we’re kids going outside for recess as we swish in our snow pants. A man slows his car next to us and in a strong Minnesotan accent says, “th-ay-nks for pr-O-testing.” We pass people handing out snacks and not enough hand-warmers. Cars honk. A woman with a kid in a stroller holds a boombox over her head playing Rage Against the Machine. I don’t know if protesting will do anything. The people who have power don’t seem to listen or care. But yelling “FUCK ICE” with a big crowd of strangers makes me feel a little less restless and angry. I also know that if I was vulnerable or hurting in this moment I’d want people to scream in the streets for me.

In short, 2025 wasn’t a Hilary Duff year. Instead, I’ve found myself listening to “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant on repeat, and that energy is motivating me to keep grinding. Ain’t no rest in this economy. Ain’t no rest when you buy a hundred-year-old house. Ain’t no rest when you’re trying to follow your literal dream of being a writer (when has that ever been easy?).

Despite this year’s challenges, however, I also did a lot of wonderful things this year that I don’t want to be overshadowed by stress and loss. I wrote a lot, read a lot, and moved my body a lot. I connected with new people and writers. So, to close out the year, here is a list of some things I loved in 2025, including some of my favorite books.

Things I Loved in 2025

• Volleyball: This year, I recovered from ankle surgery and got recruited to a new team that gels really well together. I played sand volleyball all summer and indoor in the fall. This was my first time playing volleyball in a gym since I was in high school. The smell of the gym, the squeak of the floor—it was all so nostalgic. It made me remember how obsessed I was with this sport through middle school and high school. Now, I started a second team with my younger brothers to maximize my time in the gym, and I have to play at least twice a week otherwise I get a little bummed out. I love how a fast-paced game like volleyball forces me to live in the moment unlike any other part of my day.

• Body of the Book with Lidia Yuknavitch: I dreamt about taking this class for years before it happened. Lidia is a huge inspiration to me, and I highly recommend her as a teacher. (If you haven’t read The Chronology of Water, it’s one of the first memoirs I fell in love with, and I’ve convinced friends to read it by simply reading the first paragraph aloud. Also, I know we are all eagerly anticipating Kristen Stewart’s film adaptation.) Body of the Book is a 12-week class through Corporeal Writing in which six participants each get to share pieces of a manuscript-in-progress. It felt like a beautiful and rewarding commitment to myself to spend every Monday night this summer on Zoom discussing with other writers. There were so many tidbits of wisdom in those workshops that I rushed to write down. It was the perfect amount challenging and supportive, and I’m convinced my book will hold more depth and complexity because of it.

• Publishing more of my work: This year, I published two essays that are part of my manuscript, one in The Florida Review and one in Electric Literature. After years of privately working on this project, it feels amazing to have pieces of it in the actual world.

• Revamping my English Comp syllabus: Since I’ve been teaching a gen ed composition class for two years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, I decided I should redesign my syllabus into something I actually enjoy teaching. I added a bunch more literary readings and a unit on personal narrative. I also came up with strategies to get more students participating in class discussion so there isn’t so much excruciating silence. Though it took a bit of work, it made me more excited and proud of the curriculum I’m teaching.

• Writing community: I’m thankful for a group of writers who attended my Loft class two summers ago and has continued to meet on a semi-regular basis ever since. I’m also grateful for weekly Zoom calls with Elise and Shawna from my MFA. I need to do a better job of staying connected with my other writer friends in the future.

Something I Loved and Hated

• Homeownership: It was my dream to have a house in Northeast Minneapolis, and after getting out-bid five times, we finally lucked into a house we love. It has a cute little backyard with a screened porch and a spacious sun room that I can’t wait to read in when the weather gets warmer. My cat loves watching squirrels out the window and zooming up the stairs. Before we closed the deal, a friend warned me that everyone she knew who bought a house had something big unexpectedly go wrong in the first few months. This somewhat prepared me to find out we have an offset sewer pipe, though many tears were shed when I found out how much it would cost to repair. Also stress-inducing was the fact that each sewer company quoted us told me wildly different things, and I had to sus out the salesmen from the truth-tellers. I must have seemed down about it because recently mom asked me if I regret buying my house. Yes, life would be simpler and I’d be more financially secure if I’d just continued renting, but I do love this house and hang onto hope that it will be worth it in the future. I’m holding out for that yard in the spring. A yard! What luxury.

Favorite Books of the Year

• Novel that shocked me to my core: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

• Insane story collection: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

• Vivid essay collection I already want to re-read: If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter

• Nonfiction that made me cry: The Answer is in the Wound by Kelly Sundberg, Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch

• Books I read in a day: Couplets by Maggie Millner, Trying by Chloe Caldwell

• Re-read of the year: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

• Surprise of the year: Frontier: A Memoir and Ghost Story by Erica Stern

• Craft book that is equally entertaining and helpful: Thrill Me by Benjamin Percy

• Made Me Laugh the Most: Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn

• Series Ending I’m Still Reeling From: Story of a Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

• Other novels that seem to fit the theme of sad girls reckoning with economic inequality: Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield, Amphibians by Tyler Wetherall, The Blurry Years by Eleanor Kriseman

For 2026, I am manifesting a painted bathroom and guestroom, having people over, travel, more volleyball, more local theater, and seeing friends I haven’t seen in a long time. Some of my goals are to read a few older books (on the list: Wuthering Heights and Cat’s Cradle), write a book proposal, and lead some online workshops.

I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season! What was your favorite book of the year?

What I Didn’t Get

A finished manuscript to send to agents and editors

Let’s just get this out of the way. I ended my three-year program with almost two hundred pages of random essays, stories, and poems. A lot of generative work, but far from a cohesive manuscript. I wrote about the difference between an MFA thesis and a completed manuscript here.

Beyond that, I’ll also say that traditional MFA workshops are not super geared toward book-length works. The workshop model works best for individual short stories and essays that can be read and critiqued in their entirety. Some of my professors discouraged us from submitting chapters from a larger work because we wouldn’t be able to speak to the way those chapters fit into the whole. I do know some writers who came out of the program with completed novels, but this is something to be cautious about, especially if you’re 0% interested in individual stories and essays.

Extensive publications in prestigious journals

Although I submitted a lot while in the program, I was rejected pretty much across the board. Now I’m grateful those pieces didn’t see the light of day. The MFA was much more of a generative period than a publishing period for me, though that can vary by writer. I was more successful in publishing a few years after graduating.

Career trajectory / job prospects

If you like your current job and you’re growing as a writer alongside it, I’d strongly recommend keeping that job or making sure you can go back later. An MFA pretty much only qualifies you for adjunct teaching, which is unstable and lacks benefits, and possibly editing. Most people from my program went on to adjunct, continue their previous career, or pursue a PhD. I’ve stumbled into teaching opportunities that work for me, but some days I still question my life choices.

What I Did Get

Time to write

Now the part that’s more fun—for three years, writing was my full time job. I had deadlines to keep me motivated and assigned readings to keep me inspired. On days I didn’t have class, I could sit at my desk for eight hours, banging out pages and rearranging sentences. I could dwell deep within my thoughts and see ideas to fruition faster, unlike now when my time is more fractured between different jobs and responsibilities. I got a lot of ideas out of my system and quickly saw what worked and didn’t. I also had more time to read things I wouldn’t normally gravitate toward, including theory, experimental forms, graphic novels, and classics. I had time to go on walks and daydream about the perfect opening line.

An audience

By this I mean I had professors and peers reading my work and thinking deeply about it. This was big for me because before coming to my program I was very entrenched in Catholic communities, and this was the first time I got to see how a variety of different (non-religious or formerly-religious) people reacted to my writing about the church. Sometimes it was uncomfortable to hear a room of people scrutinize what I’d written and ask questions I couldn’t answer, but it always gave me data about what people were responding to, what stuck in their mind, what got them excited.

Teaching experience

Never in my life did I want to be a teacher, but through working as a student lecturer, I learned I love teaching creative writing. I mean, it’s literally showing students literary works that have changed my life and hoping it also changes theirs. When my students distribute packets of writing to their classmates, I remember how proud I was of the first essays I ever wrote as an undergrad and how I still have the feedback letter my professor wrote me. I love giving writing prompts and hearing the quick pen scratches of a student struck by inspiration. How cool is it to introduce someone to Ottessa Moshfegh or Melissa Febos or Hanif Abdurraqib for the first time? How amazing to show someone that writing can be whatever they want?

Writer friends and mentors

I love the writers in my program. We wrote in coffee shops together, went to readings, and discussed our books over cookies at my apartment. We got drinks after class, went to movies, traveled to AWP, and had murder mystery themed parties. My advisor and I chatted on the grass outside the English building, and another professor hosted a live play reading at her house with a visiting professor among other events. Some of this was luck because I happened to land in a group I got along with, which is important when the cohort is only twelve people and there’s only a handful of professors. Certainly this is not everyone’s experience. But for me, being steeped in literary community made grad school some of the best years of my life and brought me relationships I cherish to this day.

So, based on this list, does it seem worth it? Is there anything I missed on either side? What else do you want to know?

Recommendations

I recently finished If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter, and I’m obsessed with it’s vivid scenes of childhood. I definitely want to pull apart these essays in a class someday.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is currently mesmerizing me on audiobook.

I’m a hundred pages into Story of a Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (fourth and final book of the Neapolitan Novels), and I’m already shocked and heartbroken.