To Live & Write Essays
It's the writing and discussion group I didn't know I needed - until I sat down and started writing a how-to book that will be 100% more interesting as a collection of useful and entertaining essays.
A new writing workshop group has taken shape in To Live & Write, my online writing community. It's just for essay writers and I'm super excited to flex this muscle again.
The past few years have been really intense, too intense for the kind of personal narrative and reflective essays I write. But I feel things shaking loose.
The piece I read at Beast Crawl this past Saturday felt like coming home to myself. I had no idea how much I missed digging into my deepest thoughts and feelings to find the human truth other people can relate to, and then sharing it all with a live audience.
It's an amazing experience -- to be able to connect with an audience on that level and co-exist with friends and strangers in one emotional space for that moment in time.
Since 2020, most of my energy has been focused on writers writing books. Labs, workshops, and retreats have been largely geared towards their needs. It's been awesome. I have been - and happily continue to be - surrounded by so many freaking fantastic stories and storytelling styles I lose count, walking in a multiverse of new and intriguing worlds and holding hands with an ever-expanding population of complex and wonderful characters.
It's like being backstage at a bookstore, if a bookstore were a rock concert and all those stories and worlds and characters were hanging out and milling around in the green room, forming and shaping and rehearsing to go out on the floor and perform in book form for everyone else.
I've been backstage at concerts and football games and all kinds of exciting events, forming and shaping and preparing, helping people rehearse for the big show, the big thing. And I'm telling you, being a writing coach and running such an active community of writers who actually write and have the courage to publish -- it's the same thrill.
There's a lot less anxiety and loud noise and running around in vast, crowded venues in high heels, sweat pouring down my back (and front), dodging and weaving through the press and around big, stupid TV cameras, checking my watch and putting out fires, but it's still hella cool.
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