An Interview with Jane Rubietta Welcome to the blog, Jane! Tell us about your new book, Merge: The Road After Trauma Meets Faith. Rochelle, thank you for this invitation! With a sub-subtitle of “40 ride-along reflections for the detours you didn’t choose,” it’s a book for people trying to get through another day as trauma...Read More
By Rochelle Melander May Sarton published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, anovel about a poet and writer in the early 60s, long before cell phones and the internet. Here’s what she said about the main character’s struggle to write, no doubt inspired by her own writing life: Every single day she fought a war to get...Read More
By Rochelle Melander Imagine that you have someone who’s eagerly awaiting your next writing project. She will rejoice when you finish it. He can’t wait to get it out into the world. How would you behave differently if you knew someone was waiting for your work? I’m guessing you might get serious about your writing...Read More
by Rochelle Melander There’s more than one way to look at a blank page. Gaston Bachelard wrote: A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. G.K. Chesterton had a completely different view:...Read More
by Rochelle Melander We imagine that writing and making art is easy. Sometimes it is. An idea hits us and we execute it with ease. But that’s very rare. In fact, making art can be hard. In his book, Several short sentences about writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes, “It’s hard work, and it’s been hard work...Read More
The Writer’s Guide to Collecting, Generating, Recording, and Developing New Ideas by Rochelle Melander Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. – Orson Scott Card Ever get that flash of insight that turns into a...Read More
An Interview with Poet Michele Wolf by Rochelle Melander Tell our readers about your new book of poems, Peacocks on the Streets. The book’s title and my poem “Peacocks on the Streets” are based on that time during the early months of the pandemic when we were all quarantined at home and the streets were...Read More
by Rochelle Melander I hear many horror stories about critique groups. Writers attend a group hoping for helpful feedback and receive harsh criticism, misinformation, or personal attacks. After one or more challenging experiences like that, many writers avoid critique groups, feel anxious about getting critiqued, or give up on writing. But it doesn’t have to...Read More
(And How to Critique Your Own Work) by Rochelle Melander Writers have been telling me they use AI only to edit their work. They’re not just using spell check or Grammarly. They’re uploading their work into Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to provide a critique or clean up the grammar. I get it. You’re...Read More
Game Changer #3 by Rochelle Melander “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” That saying, attributed to both Knute Rockne and Joseph P. Kennedy, was used in a hit song by Billy Ocean. It perfectly captures the American work ethic: work hard. While it may seem like a good idea to work without...Read More
