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Post-Marathon Thoughts
I ran the Rock N Roll Nashville Half Marathon a week ago, and I have a lot of thoughts. It was one of the hardest races I’ve run in a long time, and the difficulty had nothing to do with my body. My mind quit on me. It had quit on me before I even…
COVER REVEAL
I have been entirely AWOL for the past few weeks, partly because I was sick, and then I was falling behind, and then I was stressed out about falling behind. But I am well, I am back, and I am ready to buckle down and get things done. Here she is, in all her stunning…
When Everything is Going Wrong
Two posts ago, I talked about how I evaluate my writing practice/journey/whatever you want to call it. I use a few different metrics to determine if I’m growing as a writer, satisfied with my growth trend, or feel like I’m floundering in some way or another. In a perfect world, I would always “pass” my…
Lessons Learned from Dabbling in Other Genres: Creative Nonfiction
Elizabeth Upshur is a Black Southern storyteller and editor. She is the co-poetry editor at Okay Donkey Mag and is a contributing editor at The Seventh Wave. She is the cofounder of The Southern Esesu Endeavor, a virtual thirdspace for members of the Black Diaspora, and home of the annual 3 day SEE virtual retreat…
Self-Evaluation for Writers
If you want to progress, if you’re interested in seeing where your potential can take you, and if you want to build a successful writing practice, then sooner or later you’re going to need to perform some self-evaluation. No, I don’t mean giving yourself a pass or fail grade on the quality of your writing….
Not Everything is Pertinent
I’m starting a new training block in the gym today. For the past two years, all of my strength training has been geared specifically to support my running. I was careful not to overdo it volume-wise because I needed to save the bulk of my energy for running, and I needed to make sure I…
Lessons Learned from Dabbling in Other Genres: Translation
In my last blog post, I shared how playwriting has offered me a different perspective in my writing and helped mold my revision process. Today, I want to reach back even further into my writer’s toolkit to talk about what we can learn from translation as a practice and as an integral part of literary…
Just Be Curious
We live in an incredible, incredible world. There’s so much going on at all times: new things to learn, new things to try, new things to see. As a human being and especially as a writer, it’s pretty much your job to be interested. We write stories that portray facets of the world, whether through…
Be Kind to Yourself
I had a great lesson with one of my riding students today. I don’t know that she would call it great; she was having a rough ride with her horse. But she rode well and made several improvements, and I sent her home with some homework that I hope she follows through with. I told…