By Dr. Nancy Glass

I was desperate to finish my nonfiction manuscript, frustrated by lack of discipline to write every day, in despair at how distractions devoured my time. At a 2024 writing retreat in Tuscany, I revised 60 pages of my manuscript—then didn’t open the file again for four months. Procrastination had been my constant companion since college. Staring down my writing deadlines opened an invitation to rearrange a closet.

On January 1, 2025, I joined a monthlong morning writing session offered by HerStry, facilitated by poet Leigh Lucas. The goal was to develop a morning writing practice that would stick. Attendees signed onto Zoom with cameras and microphones off and wrote for 40 minutes, then joined together for a quick check-in and a short lesson on the science of habit formation.

Lead with Audacious Optimism

Toward the end of the month, a group of us decided to continue daily sessions as we battled our distractions and self-doubt, despite anecdotal evidence that writing groups aren’t known for their longevity.

Initially numbering 12, two dropped out early; the remaining 10 have demonstrated dedication to their writing and to one another. Two of us facilitate the daily writing sessions in two-week stretches. I maintain a spreadsheet of attendance, shared with the group periodically for personal accountability.

We have now completed 18 months of daily writing.

Avoid Competition

Our group ranges in age from late 20s to late 70s and includes both employed and retired business owners, college professors, physicians, a school principal/administrator, and an MFA student; among us we have accumulated sufficient post-baccalaureate degrees to wallpaper a library. With diverse skillsets and decades of professional success, we turned away from competitiveness to nurture our creativity.

We have succeeded, in part, because we encourage participants to come as often as possible and avoid judgment when personal circumstances preclude daily attendance. Last year our members dealt with caregiving responsibilities, health issues, political protests, and weather crises. And yet, we showed up, sometimes while on business trips or vacations—even me, at 5 am from Alaska!

Maintain A Consistent Process

We write together on Zoom (cameras and sound off) each morning for 50 minutes—long enough to write a few paragraphs but not so long as to overwhelm on days when inspiration eludes us.  Unlike some groups, we don’t begin with a statement of the day’s goal, although most arrive at their desk with a plan. After we write, we chat for 10 minutes, focused on the question, “How did the writing go today?” We acknowledge periods when our heads are not in the writing, when distractions pull us away. We commiserate when a piece isn’t working. And we celebrate each win: an acceptance, completion of a draft or revision, or a long-delayed submission.

Read Me a Story

In July 2025, curious to hear one another’s work, we added a bi-monthly Zoom reading. These sessions have nurtured community, as we share personal essays, stories, and spur one another on to finish drafts in progress. Although not a critiqued session, we often comment on passages that land with lyricism or power. The longer we know one another, the more delighted we are with our mutual respect and compatibility: how likely is that with 10 people in a Zoom room?

Gather the Introverts, Trouble Ahead?

Seeking deeper connections, my co-facilitator suggested we gather for an in-person writing retreat. I admit I felt anxious—what if we didn’t get along in person? What if this gathering blew us apart? All 10 of us (miraculously) met in Durham, NC for three days of writing in June 2026 with two Writeaway coaches. We arrived from across the country, shared two houses, and merged our writing lives. Our gathering felt like an alumni reunion with your nine best college friends. We workshopped pieces in progress, shared meals, took walks, and relaxed together, further cementing our friendships.

Celebrate successes

Our group accomplished a great deal this year: publication of one writer’s first fantasy novel, another’s children’s book coming out at year-end. One writer published seven op-eds, four individuals had essays accepted for publication, two people read for literary journals, one of whom was promoted to editorial assistant; several are working on book-length projects, two started newsletters or Substacks, and one began an MFA program. Others took online writing courses or webinars through HerStry, Craft Talks, or other groups; two hired book coaches to shape their manuscripts. My nonfiction manuscript is now with a developmental editor, and I published two flash essays.

Summing up our advice for other writers hoping to create a successful daily writing group:

• Create a welcoming, non-competitive culture: offer kindness when life prohibits daily participation
• Share resources: craft articles, books, upcoming webinars, calls for submissions and contests
• Learn about one another outside the writing: strengthen connections
• Celebrate successes and encourage those experiencing a slump
• Recognize that relationships create the glue of accountability and support your writing

Branched off from HerStry into an independent group, we have our own ethos of accountability, friendship, and compassion. Sitting together in a circle during our recent retreat, one friend shared that she finally felt like a writer.

I had no idea in January 2025 that joining this webinar would blossom into a vibrant, inspirational writing community, transforming strangers into friends.

Group Members: Dixie King, Nancy Glass (facilitators), Ann Abbott, Ann Bebensee, Libby Bahr, Polly Giragosian, Kelly Kolodny, Kate Levin, Ruth O’Dell, Tess Padmore.

___

Dr. Nancy Glass has published in Missouri Review, The Intima, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Examined Life, The Brevity Blog, and others. She won the 2022 Writer’s League of TX Contest in Nonfiction, was runner-up for the 2024 Perkoff Prize at the MO Review. She practiced pediatric anesthesia and hospice, retiring as Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics (2022). She received her MFA (2023) and completed a collection of pediatric hospice essays.

My memoir was written at sloth-speed. More than a decade from the first words on the page to a full first draft; more than five years beginning from when I “got serious” about writing. I wasn’t just writing; I had a full-time job and a young child. And as a primatologist, I’d spent my career doing and teaching academic writing, avoiding subjectivity and especially anything that looked like emotion. Trying to unlock “creativity” felt like swimming upstream.

And, of course, sometimes writing is just hard and slow.

Then I went to Costco.

My dating memoir had been collecting dust as I researched agents and submission guidelines, query letters, and the ever-aggravating proposal. To distract myself from this frustrating work, I decided to read something totally different. I found Ali Hazelwood’s Not in Love,a STEM-themed romance novel, right next to a 12-pack of Kirkland Signature bikini briefs. Over the course of a long weekend, I smiled my way through the meet-cute, many sex scenes, and annoying misunderstandings that are so common in the genre.

That was fun, I thought when I was done.

And out of nowhere: Maybe I could do that.

The next day, I opened a Word document and stared at the blank screen. I had only a general premise built from my own academic experience: a love story at a biological field site. Putting hands to keys, I started at the beginning, and the words flowed out of me. Where I once had grappled over finding the perfect language to articulate something that had happened to me, it felt easier to be innovative when freed from the confines of my own life. Sentences turned into paragraphs; paragraphs turned into chapters. I converted chapter one into chapter two, so I could start the book at the field site. I deleted the new chapter two, redistributing needed background details.

Sometimes, the novel even seemed to write itself. Midway through the draft, a small side character unexpectedly turned out to be a critical player in the story (Did I really think a romance could proceed without more conflict?). A few chapters later, I wrote a sentence and gasped out loud: a character had injured themselves and I hadn’t known that was going to happen. This sort of creative inspiration had never felt possible before, as I followed the reality of my lived experience.

Seven weeks later, I had completed a 67,000-word draft.

Where had this writing come from? Why couldn’t I do this with my own story, one that actually occurred and already had plot points ready to go?

One of the challenges of memoir writing was turning myself and people I know into characters. When you know your subject matter so intimately, it can be difficult to remember that your reader still needs to understand and visualize the people on the page; not just descriptions, but their relationships and motivations. Writing fiction removed this barrier, since in creating characters, I also needed to figure out who these people were and what they wanted, which made it easier to bring those details to the page. I constructed detailed character profiles, something I’d never thought to do with nonfiction.

The same fresh perspective was true for scenes and the overall narrative. Writing my memoir, it was easy to think I had described scenes in enough detail to make them feel real, since they were real to me—my brain filled in information the reader didn’t have. Sometimes I didn’t remember the specific details, and contacting John (what was his last name?) to ask if he could recall what I wore on our disastrous first date seemed like a bad idea. With fiction, it was both easier and more necessary to fully describe the world I was creating. I often started with real places, but felt free to elaborate and fabricate as needed.

Over the past few months, I’ve tiptoed back towards nonfiction, beginning a second memoir that’s been in the back of my mind for years. While the words aren’t flowing out of me as easily as they did with the romance novel, I’ve tried to continue my fiction approach:

• Looking at myself as a character, including writing character profiles for myself and the other real people who will populate the story.
• Working to craft detailed, sensory scenes that feel lived-in and allow the reader to see what I see.
• Trying to bring a sense of discovery and newness even to a story that is old to me. In writing about my life, how can I still surprise myself?

Writing fiction wasn’t something I planned, but by doing it, I’ve found a fresh perspective on my memoir writing, too.

Who I am as a writer remains in flux: do I write fiction or nonfiction? I suppose right now it’s both—and that’s a good thing.

________

Elissa Jacobs is a writer and writing professor in the Boston area. She has a Ph.D. in primatology and is seeking representation for a monkey-themed dating memoir and a lemur-themed romance novel. Find her on Instagram @elissa.k.jacobs.

Soon after my first book was published, I led a Zoom discussion for remote readers. It wasn’t my first event publicizing A German Jew’s Triumph, but it was the first—and only—time that an attendee set her screen on “mirror my video” so she could do her hair and makeup during the session. While I talked about my hero fleeing the Gestapo, she worked on her eyebrows, drawing so close to her laptop that her image became a giant eyeball. It was hard to look away, and harder not to laugh.

Book tours, I’ve learned, are full of highs, lows and unexpected moments. The woman grooming herself during my presentation makes for a great story, but what followed made a greater impression: Over the next hour, members of the Merage Jewish Community Center in Irvine, CA, asked probing questions and shared their own families’ stories of outliving Hitler’s reign of terror. They impressed me with how interacting person-to-person can be an invaluable extension of the dialogue between a writer and her readers.

This sharing of narratives, which has usually taken place during Q&As or while I’m signing books afterwards at in-person gatherings, is an experience I’ve enjoyed at over 30-plus events, in a half-dozen virtual sessions, and during a couple podcasts. They’ve been highlights of my 100-percent DIY book tour, and none of them has taken place in bookstores.

Not that I don’t love bookstores. Besides being sources of delight and mind-expansion, they’re where book buyers hang out. But the independent press that published my book was intent on marketing it as an academic work with a consequently higher price tag; excited as I was to finally hold it in my hands, I wasn’t aware that with a bookstore’s routine markup, even my beloved local seller would charge $66 for it. I had to think of a way to move sales at a more affordable price.

I also needed to get it in front of potential readers at a time when publishing insider Jane Friedman reminds writers that the No. 1 “[Thing] Your Traditional Publisher is Unlikely to Do” is “send you on a national book tour.” So, as my pub date drew near, I did my best to tap into the creative energy I’d harnessed to write the book in the first place.

My publisher allowed me to order author copies at a 50 percent discount, so I could sell them at a slightly higher price. Then I talked the book up with everyone I knew (to numbing effect, but many of my friends are writers themselves, and get it). Those interpersonal exchanges IRL got more results than social media postings and my limited earned media. Friends threw book parties and invited me to speak to book groups and at libraries with which they were affiliated. They even invited me to talk about my book at their parents’ retirement homes. Alumni contacts led to panel discussions at a large midwestern university and a well-known cultural center and a close friend who ran a literary festival was happy to finally include me in her lineup. I did incur travel expenses, but somehow managed to stay overnight with friends or family at each location, from LA to Saratoga Springs. A close chum in Kansas City, KS, even let me bunk at her home when she was out of town.

The book’s Jewish and historical themes opened other doors. I paid a registration fee and supplied non-returnable print copies of A German Jew’s Triumph to the Jewish Book Council Network so I could participate in their “Meet the Author” program; this yielded a handful of live and Zoom presentations nationwide. Locally, an event at a friend’s temple led to invitations to other synagogues. Small talk at a large party in Manhattan even yielded a Zoom Q&A as part of a global consulting firm’s Jewish Inclusion Network.

Would I have been fine with a multi-city tour? Sure, but I acknowledge that they’re reserved for celebrities and best-selling authors, and I am neither—so far. I aspire to someday get on the New York Times list—who doesn’t?—but in the meantime, I know I can take my writing on the road and meet readers where they are.

My business model won’t make me rich, but I won’t lie: Getting positive feedback in person does make me feel validated after years of work. Contrary to the dozens of acquiring editors who thought otherwise, I was right in believing that my story could touch potential book buyers. And it’s been genuinely rewarding to provide forums where attendees feel secure sharing stories their veteran and refugee forebears didn’t want to discuss. At a temple in Roslyn Heights, NY, a woman recounted how her Czech mother didn’t show up for her deportation, and for years hid in towns and woods, barely existing. Many spoke of grandparents, aunts and uncles who survived the work camps, then languished in Displaced Persons camps for years before making it to America. 

Did everyone feel drawn into a community of readers who love stories? Maybe not the woman with the voluminizer. Maybe she didn’t get much out of my discussion (besides good hair). But she doesn’t know what she missed.

___

Cindy Schweich Handler is the author of A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany (McFarland Books). A former editor for the USA Today Network, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, AARP: The Magazine and other national publications. She’s currently working on a book about end-of-life decision-making (and can’t wait to create a tour for it!).

In early drafts, my memoir was snarky. After all, it was a story about my husband’s embezzlement and incarceration and the impact on my daughters and myself, so it wasn’t surprising that I wrote with barely veiled anger and a tad of bitter sarcasm. Writing with a tone suggestive of irony is something of my style. Even the title, A Dream Life, speaks to my delusion and denial.

And, when I wasn’t being snarky, I was breezy because after all, who doesn’t enjoy a fun read about ruined lives?

For example, in a chapter about visiting prison I wrote, “The prisoners paraded like fashion models on a runway, ambling through the door in their bright orange jumpsuits.” A writing group member suggested I sounded callous. That wasn’t my intention. My intention was to be witty, not cruel. Wasn’t that obvious?

I spent weeks, maybe months thinking about life in prison, wearing loud orange uniforms that broadcast one’s identity as a criminal. While that was something I couldn’t truly fathom, it wasn’t a big leap to recognize that comparing prisoners to fashion models didn’t express the complexities of my feelings. Filtering my loss through snark was not intended to ridicule prisoners but was an attempt to express my newly formed awareness that my husband and I were worlds apart.

Maybe I needed to write about that.

How did other writers compose their memoirs about loss, trauma and disappointment? I reread Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle to find out. Walls had plenty to be angry about, including parents constantly relocating to avoid law enforcement, a life of poverty and a father struggling with alcohol abuse. She leaves it to the reader to create their own judgments while she depicts her parents as complex people with hopes and dreams. Her pages aren’t filled with bitter sarcasm or disdain; instead, she helps readers see why she loved them despite their flaws. Her nuances and honest account of entanglements deepen the tale and allow readers to be in the moment and identify with the young girl who struggles to make sense of a confusing and chaotic childhood.

Many drafts and several years later I received feedback from a developmental editor who asked, “what were you thinking?” or “what about your upbringing made you go along with this?” or this, “It’s so shocking it takes me out of the story.” These questions and remarks challenged me to investigate experiences, thoughts and feelings that contributed to my take on events. Initially, I felt defensive since I believed my passive-aggressive remarks, which tended to be more aggressive than passive, sufficed to relay what I was thinking. But once I got past feeling misunderstood, I opened myself to the possibility of change. More than anything, I wanted readers to identify with the character who was me and that happens best when writing is authentic.

I’m not suggesting that writing should be apologetic or bland because it doesn’t express honest emotions, including resentments. Of course, writing about our less-than-pure thoughts is valuable, especially when it includes analysis and reflection rather than glib remarks that don’t satisfy the reader’s interest in understanding our motivation or back story.

If you happen to find yourself swimming in snark waters, here are a few things that helped me:

See snark as a guise for anger:

Being flip can be a defence mechanism standing between myself as a writer and the hard work of self-reflection. If my overarching tone is frothing and edgy, then readers may not be able to get past that with a take-away that allows healing. I’ve learned to see snark as a signal to examine a scene and provide insight into my thoughts and feelings and possibly those of the antagonist.

Accept Feedback:

Self-awareness does not arrive all at once like coins pouring from a slot machine. Even when it makes me squirm, feedback helps me grow. Rather than dismissing feedback or pushing back against it, I sit with that discomfort. Resistance could be because I’m not ready to be vulnerable but being vulnerable is at the core of memoir writing. Memoirists can be in two places at once. We can be the person who experienced an event and we can also be the person who has synthesized the event to arrive at a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Watch for snark-adjacent writing:

A blithe or breezy tone hastens important scenes and diverts readers’ attention from emotional impact in the same way sarcasm does. My sometimes-whimsical writing wasn’t serving my readers or me because I was throwing down quips without investigating what was behind my superficial remarks, even if I thought they were clever.

Readers who struggle with their own life experiences read memoirs for a glimpse into who they could become when things settle down, when they are able to reflect on their role and participate in their own story, when they stop feeling victimized. They depend on the memoirist to show that path forward.

___

Wendy Swift is the author of a memoir, A Dream Life, as well as essays published in HuffPost, Memoir Magazine, Yellow Arrow Journal, The Brevity Blog and Grub Street Literary Magazine. Swift is a mentor with the We Are Not Numbers nonprofit and serves as a fiction reader for Mud Season Review.

Is it possible to be from the most splendid nowhere in the world? A blank expanse in the minds of others?

Of course it is. I’m from Oklahoma.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it. 46th state to join the union. FKA “No Man’s Land.”

Maybe you’ve read John Steinbeck’s version of Dust Bowl country, with everyone leaving, heading in that ever-more-appealing direction: West. Or maybe you saw Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptation of Oklahoma playwright Lynn Riggs’ Green Grow the Lilacs. Killers of the Flower Moon was published in 2017, but is set in the 1920s—we are a state people like to portray the past of, but rarely the present. OK, technically, Steinbeck was writing about his present, but from media representation, you’d think we’re still riding in our surreys with the fringes on top, singing about how “everything’s up to date in Kansas City.”

For all the talk of diversity in publishing, there remains a noticeable void in regional representation. Bookstores the country over are filled with novels set in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, and other glam locations. I’ve often wondered at the absence of books depicting the places I know best: the plains, fields, towns, and lesser-known cities that make up the vast middle of our country.

Like many queers growing up far from the liberal, coastal cities, I first found my community in books. But all the gays in the books I read lived far from Tulsa. I loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, even though it wasn’t my city, but I still knew that there were queers even in the flyover states. My own experience proved that gay life in the Midwest and South was lively and diverse, but I hardly ever saw that reflected in literature.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s oft-quoted TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” she explains that when she first began writing in Nigeria, she replicated what she read:

QUOTE I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. END QUOTE

I, too, had been influenced by this long-looming idea that writing must be done in New York if it is to be done at all, and began writing about the Big Apple from my bedroom in Oklahoma. But what could I, having only ever visited there, write about NYC that hadn’t already been said? And hasn’t New York become enough of a character? There is a long list of novels that critics have raved over as “love letters to the city.”

But I no longer want to write a love letter to a city that isn’t mine. I no longer want to read about dreamy Italian villas, I don’t long for San Francisco nightlife on the page, I don’t even need east-coast-liberal-arts-college University Novels. I want love letters to the corner dive bar, to the strip mall, to the cracked-up parking lot in front of the Walmart, to the chain stores and Quiktrips, to the chain link fences, to the countryside dotted with cow patties, to whatever pedestrian bridge represents your personal Center of the Universe.

And if I want those stories, I’ll have to write them myself, and encourage others to write them so that I, greedy reader that I am, can curl up with a tale about a little-known place I will surely love by the time I reach the last page.

Some writers are already making their homes into lively characters in their work. Annie Proulx makes Wyoming, the least populous state, teem with life. Ben Lerner’s novel The Topeka School depicts his hometown in all the kaleidoscopic light that mid-sized cities and small towns contain if one is willing to look at them hard enough. Regional magazines across the country platform this kind of writing: New Territory, Midwest Review, Midwest Weird, The Crawfish, Deep South Magazine, and many more. There is also the magazine I started just so I could read about my home: Okie Modern: A Journal of Contemporary Oklahoma Literature.

What I’m talking about is that stupidly over-referenced line from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” If we write it, if we read more about these nowhere places, they will stop being nowheres and become the wild, wonderful places we know them to be.

I recommend starting with the same advice they tell you in writing school: be specific.

Good literature has always been about the details. Write me a letter and fill it with every grimy corner of Main Street, every angry dog next door, every dish on the menu at your local diner. Write it well and write it honestly. Write your home onto the map.

I can’t wait to read it.

________

Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Oklahoma. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Wenger’s works have appeared, or are forthcoming in, Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Wenger earned her MFA at Iowa State University and is a PhD student at the University of Utah. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Okie Modern: A Journal of Contemporary Oklahoma Literature. Follow us on Instagram @okiemodern.

If there’s a “sweet spot” for an essay’s word count—say, 2,000-4,500 words, as many journals list in their submission guidelines—it has mostly eluded me. Maybe it’s my dualistic nature: my tendency to either tightly control my circumstances or relinquish myself to the wilds of fate. I love the craft of concision required of a 750-word essay. And I love the adventuresome sprawl of a 10,000-word essay.

The memoir-in-essays I’m currently finishing, A Woman’s Prime, has both. The manuscript is anchored by four essays over the 8,000-words each, paced out with flash essays. The book deliberately zooms way in through the flash essays, highlighting moments that serve as microcosms of the whole, and then way out in the longer pieces, placing personal experience in dialogue with research, cultural analysis, and literary theory. The long essays also contextualize the flash essays. The flash pieces can stand on their own but gain depth by their proximity to the expansive essays of the collection. This helps ensure the body of work is cohesive.

The book’s narrative arc covers my “sandwich generation” years. As I stare down age forty-four, these are the years in which I cared for and grieved a dying parent, became a working mother with the breadwinning job, and solidly entered middle age with increasing professional duties, a second aging parent, and the sea change of perimenopause. Such experiences are evergreen, part of many human stories. Mine happened to take place inside years of vicious political division, the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerating climate change, gun violence, and life-threatening gaps in women’s healthcare at the zenith of others’ dependence on me.

Such heavy subject matter has the danger of burning readers out. If I’m going to publish a forty-three-page essay—the longest in the book—it can’t feel like a slog.

When writing long essays about serious experiences like premenstrual dysphoric disorder or grief, it’s still my job to keep the reader entertained. As I write about the personal and social upheaval of this decade of my life, I’ve learned to entertain myself. If I feel bogged down in the writing, readers will feel bogged down in the reading. This is where curiosity and play become essential tools—first on the page, and then, if I’m smart enough to apply the lessons of writing, in life.

One strategy I use for expansive essays is leaning into absurdity. Take one of the book’s longest essays, “Last Dye,” which won the Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2025 Long Story/Essay contest: The essay is about growing out my gray hair during quarantine. This wasn’t a particularly thrilling act; mostly, it involved waiting. But what went on in my mind—primarily suspicion of anyone supportive of my decision, certain that “support” meant “pity”—was funny in retrospect. I unfriended a former college professor on Facebook for joking that I could swindle my way into senior discounts. I imagined the homecoming queens of high school sipping lattes and laughing at photos of me online. I thought about—though did not!—failing the student who pulled up a photo of her 77-year-old yoga teacher and said I looked just like her. (I was 38 at the time.)

While I’m acting out every worst stereotype about women’s relationships—that they run on comparison, competition, and paranoia—my husband, who had gently encouraged me to embrace my natural hair color, surpasses me in feminism. In the essay, this makes me even more comedically mad. How dare he be better at my aging than I am?

Because the action of growing out hair isn’t a particularly compelling narrative, I needed to understand why this largely inconsequential decision felt so big. Adding to what I hope is a humorous and self-aware account, “Last Dye” examines its subject from several angles, which adds to the word count. The essay includes a history of hair dye—how what we put on our heads today was discovered by the search for a cure for malaria; how 1950s housewives snuck through the back entrances of salons to get their hair colored; how Jean Harlow dipped her locks in Clorox. It considers what Coco Chanel meant when she said women who change their hair are about to change their lives. It discusses the tiresome negotiations women often have with themselves about aging, trading hair dye for expensive skincare products in my case. It celebrates the infamous (and hilarious) speech in the show Fleabag about women’s relationships to their hair. It follows gray-haired influencers on Instagram. And it also describes disinfecting our groceries and following epidemiologists on X as Boston’s Covid-19 cases shot up into the thousands per day, and I stayed behind closed doors where no one could see my demarcation line.

Going down these switchbacks showed me that women’s hair isn’t just part of their appearance. Hair is symbolic, a form of silent communication about how we want to be seen, how we fulfill or reject cultural expectations about aging.

Long essays give me the room to see difficult subjects through different filters, including the absurd, the satirical, the academic and rhetorical, and the gallows humor of getting older—a privilege I truly do take seriously.

Note: This post is adapted from my presentation on the AWP 2026 panel “Writing Long in the Age of the Quick Take.”

__________

Amy Monticello is the author of two nonfiction chapbooks, Close Quarters and How to Euthanize a Horse, and co-author of The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing. Her essays have been published in the North American Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CALYX, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram or Facebook. 

To: Procrastination

CC: Sloth, Distraction, Perfectionism, Vanity

Dear Procrastination,

I’ve been meaning to write to you for a long time, but I just didn’t get around to it. I’ve been very busy with other things, and I wasn’t sure what to say, and I couldn’t find the right stationery, and the printer needed a new ink cartridge so I had to order one, and then the envelopes in the drawer were the wrong size, and the “Love” stamps I had certainly weren’t appropriate, and it was raining so I couldn’t go outside to the mailbox, and then the postal worker had already delivered our mail and driven past our house. And my letter would just have been returned to sender.

So I decided to write an email instead, but first I had to answer a lot of other emails. I think I’ll finish this message tomorrow. Or maybe in a few days.

Anyway, even aside from these important considerations, I wasn’t ready to confront you, but let’s face it: you are the reason that I haven’t revised the essays I’ve already written, and you are the reason I haven’t written more new ones.

And no wonder it’s so hard to deal with you, Procrastination, because you aren’t acting alone! Yes, I know who is conspiring with you to put roadblocks in my way.

Sloth, still in pajamas with uncombed hair; easy to find because you stay in one place. You linger in bed, scrunching under the covers after having silenced the alarm, maybe a couple of times. You lounge in a patio chair, scrolling Instagram, then making your feed even longer by following yet another account. When you finally haul yourself to the computer and open a document, you yawn and drift over to the browser window.

You gaze out the actual window at the pine trees for a while.

You whine, “I’m ti-i-i-red.”

Your languor and slowness may seem weak, but you have a vigorous co-conspirator. Distraction’s eyes dart here and there. Sometimes Distraction gets the better of you, Sloth, by picking up that overflowing laundry basket and taking it to the washing machine—and if Distraction is working really hard, might wrestle you into dusting the furniture or even tackling the basement chaos. (Good luck with that!) But much more often Distraction slyly dangles colorful lures on its fishing line: a new workshop that might teach me the secrets of getting published, the latest episode of my favorite literary podcast, a bookbinding project using gorgeous handprinted papers and a technique I just learned—

Wait, has some crucial event happened in the past five minutes? Better check the news!

And if by some miracle Sloth and Distraction are temporarily sidelined (well, Sloth wasn’t making much of an effort anyway), this is your moment, Perfectionism.

I don’t know what you look like because your harsh light blinds me, but I can feel and hear you. You usurp my desk chair and crowd me, clinging to the edge, as you whisper incessantly,

Maybe this isn’t the optimal time of day for mental exertion?

Maybe that’s not the best choice of subject for this essay?

Maybe that paragraph, that sentence, is too long, is too short, doesn’t use the absolutely right words?

Maybe you’ll never be able to revise that essay to reach its full potential? Because it could be better…better…better….

One more member of this cabal lurks behind the rest. Vanity.

If you could tear yourself away from gazing into that mirror—no, don’t pick up your phone to see how many “likes” you got! —I’m talking to you.

“Of course, isn’t everyone?” you say airily. It’s you, Vanity, motivating Perfectionism, because you know you are capable of lofty achievements, if only given enough time.     

And thus—caught in the toils of Procrastination, Sloth, Distraction, Perfectionism, and Vanity—I find myself, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, wallowing in the Slough of Despond, unable to climb the Hill of Difficulty.

But Vanity, you could also save the day.

Because if there’s one place you dread finding yourself, it’s in the Valley of Humiliation. You’re smart, you’re special; you are the only one who can convince your fellow vices to loosen their grip, so that you and I avoid falling into that awful chasm and can take a few more steps along the path I want to follow.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to accomplish such a feat alone. I am blind-copying this letter to another recipient who will help you, someone with a lot of power.

Who? You’ll find out soon enough.

Sincerely yours,

Nora

BCC: Deadline

________

Nora Vivian Odendahl is the author of Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment; prior to her career as a test developer, she worked as a journalist for The Princeton Packet and regional magazines. She received her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and her PhD in English from Princeton University. Currently, she is writing a volume of essays illustrated with her photographs, as seen on her Instagram account, @noraodendahl

When I started writing my memoir about working at The Marine Mammal Center in Northern California in the ‘80s and ‘90s, my goal was to have people vicariously experience what I had lived. During that time and after, I’ve continued to be involved in environmental protection and wildlife conservation projects. Feeling overwhelmed by these pressing issues, I wanted to share some of the lighter, more humorous moments that had lifted my own spirits.

I have fond memories of when animals at The Center surprised or outsmarted us, like the young Steller sea lion who created games for herself while she needed to be housed alone. On a wet day she’d slide across her pen, point her head to the sky, and open her mouth to catch raindrops on her tongue, then later she learned to open the pen gate and let herself out to explore the rest of the compound.  I thought her story and others like it would be the heart of the memoir.

But The Center admits many animals who suffer from anthropogenic (human-caused) problems. Like harbor seal pups picked up by well-intentioned but misguided people who assume they are abandoned when their mother is almost certainly in the water nearby. One such pup suffered permanent health problems from being overheated while in transport to our facility. He spent the last few years of a very short life in a marine park.

Worse are the injuries from fishing gear entanglements, or gunshot wounds, some clearly intentional. Environmental pollution, climate change, ocean warming and other anthropogenic issues are the most common factors that cause animals to need care at The Center today. Far outnumbering the simple to treat cases of parasite overload and starvation that younger animals often suffer while learning to feed on their own—that had been the bulk of our patient load in the early days. In addition, ocean noise and ship strikes caused several whale strandings, none ended well.

Still, it took a developmental editor’s suggestion to focus on these issues for me to see how much stronger those difficult stories would make my book. I sat with that input for days, unsure if it was the right advice for me. Steeling myself, I went through the book, chapter by chapter, building in the history of animals whose admissions were related to our abuse of our oceans. Like the sea lions dying from exposure to harmful algal blooms or the bent body of a young sperm whale hit by a boat. Revisiting those stories brought tears, a heaviness I had to sit with, pain I hadn’t processed in the years since working with those victims. It was worth it.

Now when I look at what the book is becoming, I realize how much stronger it is. The playful moments are still there, but they’re part of a much bigger story. Most chapters include the  science that helped us understand what was happening to the animals and address what can be done to change the situations these animals face such as working with government agencies to establish warning systems in areas where great whales migrate; or simply understanding the stress harbor seals experience when they are crowded, which changed how we housed the pups. And I’ve added an appendix to help readers know where to go to dig deeper into the issues, perhaps learn more, even become ocean advocates.

The impacts of ocean noise, warming, and pollution, and the role of the government in marine wildlife management are all things that are beginning to become common knowledge. And even when people are aware of these serious issues, the depth of information I’ve now included provides much more detail for those who want do more to help turn things around.

Incorporating the heartbreaking, challenging side of the work has made my book more than a collection of anecdotes. If one person who reads it is moved to get involved in ocean conservation, wildlife rehabilitation or advocacy, I’ll feel that the depth of those animals’ stories have made a difference.

Revisiting, revising and rethinking was critical. Fresh eyes helped me see that the manuscript wasn’t ready to be sent out. Forced me to dig into the latest information on threats to our oceans, our coasts, our environment. The resulting research and detail were worth the time it took me to get there.

But I’m still happy to share the lighter side of wildlife rehab, for example, a late-night call I received from an experienced crew member who found a fur seal running loose. He captured the animal, put it back in its enclosure, only to see the seal once again running loose. Looking more closely, he realized the seal was small enough to lift a door opening for a water bowl, one just big enough to let the tiny seal escape. Before calling to tell me what had happened, he tightly bungeed that opening.

The life of a wildlife rehabber, or a writer, always unpredictable, never dull.

__________

A fascination with the natural world guides Dawn’s life. Her writing has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly and Split Rock Review among others. She is the author of the Hand-rearing Tree and Ground Squirrels chapter in Hand-rearing Wild and Domestic Animals by Laurie J. Gage. She can be found at her website or on Substack.

By Chelene Knight

I recently asked a room full of nonfiction writers to share an object that held value to them. I emphasized that the object they would bring to class shouldn’t be considered for its monetary value, but instead to think about the personal story attached.

We looked around the room at each other’s objects. A pendant, a stuffed animal, an old camp bracelet, a rock, a paper clip pulled from the bottom of a purse.

Why are these objects so valuable?

*

As writers we produce. We create. But so much of the creation process (all the steps and creative risks, and winding paths taken in order to arrive at that end result) is hidden. As writers we toil away, tinker, delete, read, work on ourselves, mind map, sketch, go for walks, vent to friends, sign up for courses, take Pilates classes at the local community centre as a way to loosen the body, observe, eavesdrop, cringe in workshops where our work is “misunderstood” or where our raw drafts are weirdly applauded. We apply for grants, pick ourselves up after grants are rejected, celebrate when grants are funded. We take part in peer workshops, revise, and splash various anecdotes onto colourful index cards in hopes of making sense of a narrative structure that only seems to line up in our heads.

The process of writing is uncontainable. It’s a wild thing! Alive in all its fullness. And yet no one ever sees any remnant of it. We tuck it away. We’ve all been taught to clean up after ourselves.

*

The first writer in the workshop raises her hand to tell the story of how she acquired the notebook she held in her hand. Her object: Worn brown leather, an etched spine, and a long-weathered strap that lapped around the notebook twice, neatly tucked itself into the small black loop on the front. Over the next few minutes, the emotional weight of her story fills the room. I witness eyes tear up. I’m enveloped by the silence punctuated with soft oh’s and hmm’s. The notebook, previously an object without any real value, now had a face, a name, a story. We valued it instantly. It came to life and we couldn’t help but look at it differently.

A few books ago I started what I call my “unstructured play notebook,” essentially a plain notebook that contains my trial and error, character maps, bullet points of potential scenes, notes on setting, pros and cons lists of my character’s decision-making, and weird little creative experiments related to my current book project. Sketches, ideas, reflections, plot maps, questions I want to explore. It’s tabbed, and semi-organized, but at the same time it’s messy. Everything makes its way into this notebook in the way that it arrives.

Now, when given the opportunity to talk about my book, in interviews, or panel appearances, or readings, I bring this notebook with me like a friend who holds all my secrets. I get to decide how much I share; how much I show. Eyes widen when I describe the thinking behind the narrative structure of my book. The non-writers in the room suddenly have a portal into what it takes to write a book. I imagine the outdated image of a writer slapping away at keys on a typewriter fade to black. When I decide to pick a piece from my private, messy notebook and attach a story to it, my process suddenly increases in value. The image of the working writer suddenly climbs up a notch on the ladder. Or at least I like to think so.

*

Although starting an unstructured play notebook has been a part of my process for a few years now, it feels like a timely decision in today’s world of AI scares. It feels like some sort of creative activism percolating in a world where we have difficulty discerning what is fake from real. My unstructured play notebook is priceless.

If you were to start your own unstructured play notebook, what would you call it? What would you add? What story would you tell about it?
 ___

Chelene Knight is the author of five books including the awarding-winning novel Junie. She is a fiction mentor with the University of Kings College. Chelene also runs her own Creative Studio, Breathing Space Creative where she works with writers inside that liminal space between the craft of writing and the business of writing to help them get more from their creative practice. Her class Say No With Love Letters explores how she fits her life around her creative practice.

I wanted a book contract, so I spent $10,000 to get it.

Writers are taught that superb writing ultimately snags a literary agent’s eye. Purists often think it sacrilegious to pay-to-play, that we are all Anne Lamotts and Stephen Kings waiting to be discovered.

I say: baloney.

Most anything we do costs dough (children, houses, cocaine habits). I jest. Sort of.

After winning awards with my unpublished memoir, followed by years spent in authorly bitterness, I spent six months and 10K on my first book with two goals:

1) Create online excitement for my book.

2) Put that excitement in front of agents who might rep it.

$1,500 went to a graphic designer for a book jacket and artwork. I published Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship as print-on-demand on Amazon ($0) and then bought a bunch of my own books ($500). A web site cost $1,500. A press release/admin person for four months cost $3,000.

Kirkus and Clarion Book Reviews cost $400 each. The reviews were good and I posted them in their entirety to social media. Then I put them into a Constant Contact eNewsletter ($50 a month) and sent them to anyone I’d ever met. Most importantly, the eNews went to agents, query-style, whom I’d researched, and who sold my kind of book.

Finally, I shipped books, press releases and promo swag (plastic wine glasses with my book jacket printed on them) to editors and radio hosts, hoping they’d champion my book to their audiences ($350).

It was exhausting. But it wasn’t atom-splitting.

Enough books sold to shoot Cheap Cabernet to #1 on Amazon’s Movers & Shakers list of products that sold the most in the past 24 hours. Then it rose in the Memoir category, too. I made sure the agents got that news by dropping screenshots into the eNewsletter template. One of the dozen agents who responded held an auction and sold my self-published book to Hyperion.

For years I’d heard every push-back, every rejection, every discouragement: No one buys memoir. No one knows you.

What happened was an extraordinary gamble. I struck what Publishers Marketplace calls a “Very Nice Deal” ($50,000 – $99,000 advance). Equally important, I was now in the traditionally published-by-a-major-publisher category.

My next book, Holy Hustle: An East Side Indy Love Story, is getting similar treatment. I asked an online acquaintance, a New York Times best-selling author to read it and she called it “a tour de force.” Ditto with a former Simon & Schuster editor: “This is the best thing I’ve read all year.”

Them’s sellin’ words and they are on Holy Hustle’s web site.

Building an enthusiastic online audience is, more than ever, part of the agent-securing process. A big existing audience that you’ve developed sells books. Agents and publishers want that, and you can build it.

So when is it all too much?

Can’t an author get discovered and picked up by an agent at conferences, via classes and within the standard submissions process?

Yes, and many do.

I chose to help fate. And I say do not give up, even if your resources are solely effort and talent. You can be broke and still write brilliantly. You can get an agent. That book can get sold. Writers have been sending out manuscripts since forever.

But if there is a budget—any budget—use it.

After my first book published, people clutched their pearls and gasped, “I don’t have $10,000. I’ve got bills.” I respect that.

Me too.I had a mortgage and bills and obligations.

Still, I took $10,000 from savings and I took the chance.

Maybe the writing class wants $125 to join. Maybe that’s an excellent way to spend $125; maybe the snow tires can wait.

Maybe the $6 coffee at your favorite café is a lot, when you can make coffee at home. But maybe that eclectic crowd and seasonal art is just the vibe you need to craft that next chapter.

It’s sacrilegious, I know, to speak to what many view as disposable-income indulgences when the daily headlines make us all cower and wonder how we’re going to finance the rest of our lives.

But maybe that $125 class or that $6 coffee creates art. And maybe art is the answer to chaos.

Investing real money in your dream changes the game, because it changes you and therefore your art. Now you are driving this bus, getting art, your art, to the masses.

Maybe I will and maybe I won’t spend another $10,000 on this book. But I am not afraid to consider efforts that cost real money.

Because, as they say, I am worth it.

And this new book? You’d better believe it is.

________

Cathie Beck is the author of Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship (Hyperion), an Amazon #1 Mover & Shaker, Target Emerging Author selection, and Denver Post bestseller. Her journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Poets & Writers, and Writer’s Digest. Holy Hustle: An East Side Indy Love Story is her second book.