An Interview with Jane Kelley by Rochelle Melander Today’s tip is an interview with my dear friend, Jane Kelley. I had the joy of reading her book, Grace and the Butterfly Effect before it was published. Spoiler alert: I loved it! Featuring lovable characters, a quirky community, and a quest worth fighting for, Grace and...Read More

An Interview with Elaine Blanchard by Rochelle Melander Tell me about your new memoir, I Remember You. I have written my memoir, I Remember You: The Making of an Activist, to illustrate the healing power of love in our lives. It is my hope that those who read the book will realize how racism and...Read More

by Rochelle Melander “Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness, and loss of belonging in the world and through it I’ll walk myself home.”― Nikki Rowe It’s been a week. Between worrying about whether we’ll be able to afford health care next year and watching the horrific videos of demolition claws tearing down...Read More

An Interview with Silvia Acevedo Tell us about your new book, MAIL-ORDER MONSTERS: CRASH COURSE. Mail-Order Monsters is the story of a ten-year-old boy who’s so desperate for a new best friend that he orders monsters from an ad in the back of a comic book. He’s not entirely convinced the ad is real or that...Read More

by Rochelle Melander When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species in 1859, the library at Trinity College, Cambridge—where Darwin had attended college—banned his book immediately. In 2019, On the Origin of the Species was named the most influential banned book of all time. That’s an amazing legacy, considering Darwin came close to...Read More

by Rochelle Melander Distracted from distraction by distraction. – T.S. Eliot Every day, I talk to people who want to write but can’t seem to get traction on their project. In the next few weeks, I’ll talk about the many obstacles we face and how to overcome them. The biggest obstacle I hear right now...Read More

What Would You Do If You Knew You Couldn’t Fail? We are fast approaching the last quarter of the year. Have you accomplished what you set out to do in January? In Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s audio presentation, The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype, she encourages: “You stand in my...Read More

What My Heroes Taught Me About Writing by Rochelle Melander  “Even when you’re sure everything is falling to pieces, the moon is always right back in its usual place the next evening; the birds are still singing the next day as sweetly and eagerly as ever. And whether or not their singing is of any...Read More

An Interview with Jeannée Sacken about her new book, her experience as a photographer, and more. Today’s tip features my good friend Jeannée Sacken talking about her new novel, The Women Who Stand Between. She appears at Boswell Book Company this Friday at 6:30 PM. Tell us about your new novel. The Women Who Stand...Read More

by Rochelle Melander At last week’s class, Level Up: Dream a New Dream, I talked about the benefits of using gamification to write more. Gamification brings game elements to existing experiences to make them more engaging. It has been used in just about every area of life, including the military, advertising and marketing, and in the...Read More