My first book was published by a prestigious New York publisher (FSG) when I was twenty-eight years old. I’d always loved teaching, and was already teaching at community colleges and privately. Instantly, I became a mentor. I taught a group of women mostly twenty to thirty years older than I was, a group that included at times my mother and my sister. I lead it. These women had raised children and lived in beautiful homes, but they were afraid to write. I had done none of those thing. I figured people who had could do anything. Write a book? That was nothing compared to sustaining a family.

(Now that I’ve done both, I know that both are daily practices, each calling for facing fears, letting go of expectations, returning again and again to the task at hand.)

But what happened to me when I became a mentor is that I thought I could no longer be a student. Of course, I continued to read and to study and to do and to fail and thus to grow. I didn’t stop learning, but I cut myself off to a degree from the precious opportunity to have someone else hold the space of knowing, of leading, of asking questions, of facilitating the creative process.

Now I’ve returned to those pleasures with such gratitude and joy. Even to hear what I already know, about creating scene or structuring story, in the context of a class gives me the chance to sit and think about it in relation to my current project. To muse, to be struck by sudden inspiration, to take risks, to be held and guide, to be mentored.

We all need this. I love offering it to others and I love receiving it myself. And I set up Book Writing World so that I could teach on the edge of what I most need to learn, what I believe we all need to learn and re-learn, daily: how to trust our creative visions; how to immerse ourselves in what most inspires us; how to set up meaningful, effective writing lives; how to take risks; how to en-courage productivity and narrative power. Together, as a community, we have created a gorgeous, generous incubator for the writer and the writing life. That’s all I really want to say today, except for this: Join us. Get mentored. Make space for this precious gift you have. Say yes to it; let us say yes to it. Come write.

Doors are open. Some classes are sold out and some have a few spots left. One of them is yours. But you have to take it: https://bookwritingworld.com/work-with-me/