A Year Full of Creativity

Dearest clever girls,

This year, I’ve decided to fill my life with creative endeavors. I don’t know about you, but I want to live life to its fullest. For me, the moments when I feel most alive and in awe of what I can do as a human are when I get to be creative. That’s why this year, I’m cultivating a more dedicated art practice.

What does that look like? Well, in January, I launched my art studio, Merge, with fellow artist Leslie Archibald. Throughout the year, I’ll be teaching a series of in-person workshops that aren't just meant to help pay the rent; they’re actually art forms I love or feel curious about. For me, teaching creatives is one way I find inspiration. It’s a truly exciting feeling to see people respond to my prompts and to guide writers through their experience, validating that writing is hard and that being creative can be even harder in today’s world.

It’s a strange feeling having my own art studio. Every time I walk into that space, I feel safe and at home. While most of the month it sits dormant, when a workshop happens, the strangeness suddenly slips away, and I realize: This little weird space I’ve carved out is right where I belong.

Near the end of the year, I’ll be walking with van Gogh to create my newest, hardest writing challenge yet: The Grow with Van Gogh challenge. This takes the form of a 70-day workshop. You can imagine that creating 70 days worth of content is a big challenge, but it will be worth it to get to gift that challenge to artists who want to grow their creative practice.

One thing I’m not giving up on is exploring what I love. When it comes down to it, the more I focus on the things that matter to me—Family, my pets, my own health and mental focus, and my creative practice—the happier I feel.

What would make you happy this year? Where can you find space to refocus and dedicate yourself to what you love? I hope you take time to keep things weird.

Write what you love, love what you write.

As a reminder, if you love what I do and want to support me, you can now upgrade to this newsletter to get extra-weird perks:

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I'm a working narrative artist, and you can catch some of my upcoming in-person workshops happening at my art studio, MERGE, in 2026:

Probably from PANK 💀

Every Weird Circular, I list upcoming opportunities to publish your writing geared toward writers of the weird (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative!) I prioritize PAID opportunities by markets I trust and try to vet as much as I can.

Upcoming Submission Windows:

• Barrelhouse, deadline 3/15: Theme: The Aftermath (stories focused on the moments after a climactic event). Short stories up to 5k, 3-5 poems. Art. Pays $50.

• Flash Fiction online, deadline 3/31, theme: Tiny Gods. Flash Fiction up to 1k. Pays $100.

• Hearth Stories, deadline 3/31. Cozy pre-industrial-revolution (vegan) stories up to 10k. Pays $.01/word.

• Last Girls Club, deadline 4/15: Theme: Live and Die by Your Words. Short Fiction up to 2.5k. Poems less than 200 words. Flash fiction less than 1k. Nonfiction 1.5-2.5k. Pay varies.

• Utopia Science Fiction, rolling theme deadlines. Current theme: cozy optimistic stories set in utopias. Short stories 100-4k words. Up to 5 short poems or one long poem (see guidelines). Nonfiction up to 6k. Pay varies.

Need more submission ideas? Check the Grinder's newest markets, Duotrope's calendar, Submittable’s Discover Feature, Heavy Feather Review’s Where to Submit, SFPA's Speculative Poetry Markets, Horror Tree, Moksha's Open Publications, or The International Writer’s Collective Blog.

Baule Mask by Norman Lewis, 1935

Prompt #1: Ekphrastic Classic Art

In March, I’m teaching an ekphrastic writing workshop. Here's one prompt from the class! Visit the website https://www.wikiart.org/ This website updates daily with random classical artwork. Pick the first work that interests you and write about it:

• What do you see? Colors, lines, shapes, figures, etc?

• Does this artwork have a voice? What would it say?

• Do you know the artist? Google the artist and pick one interesting fact about them to use in your piece.

Bonus Round: Meta Art Writing

Try “meta” art writing: Write a piece inspired by the artwork that doesn’t reference it in any way but creates an entirely new and original work.

Prompt #2: The Life of Objects

Pick a random object from your home. It could be something with a lot of sentimental value, or something entirely mundane. Start by describing the object. What is its color, shape, texture, and use? Then, personify the object. Give it a voice. Let it talk to you or the reader. Give the object an internal inner world.

Bonus Round: Insert YOU

Now put yourself in the piece. What does the object mean to you? Why do you care about it? What metaphor does it have for your life?

Prompt #3: Self-Portrait

The artist makes a self portrait of themselves with a mirror. Do the same with your writing. Sit in front of a mirror and describe your face as you see it. Try to include as much detail as possible.

Bonus Round: Love Thyself

Now write a love letter to that person you see in the mirror.

What I’m Consuming This Month (Literally, it’s in my brain-belly)

📖 Weird Book of the Month: The Ekphrastic Writer

Okay, this is kind of cheating, but I have to admit the only thing I’ve been reading this month is writing workshop related. That being said, a huge reference for my upcoming March workshop is this book. It is FULL of prompts for ekphrasis, with a new prompt on nearly every page. I can’t recommend it enough!

🧵 Craft Article of the Month: Writing as Witchcraft by Theodora Goss

Goss does a wonderful job of tracing the ways in which words have power through different examples in literature. I would add that one way to think about your writing as magic is to consider the well of imagination from which your words are conjured. How can you fill that well up? Magic is often framed as a finite resource. If your words are magic, how can you make sure you keep them alive so they can keep conjuring stories for you?

🎵 Music to Write by: Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka - Hiraeth

I absolutely adore this super-strange and atmospheric piece. It reminds me of being trapped on some Greek island with sirens. Very big fantasy vibes.

This newsletter is entirely run by me, Holly, your corporeal host. I’m just a bundle of anxiety shoved into a sweater and glasses, fueled by caffeine-free-zero-sugar Coke and feminine rage. I really, really love having you around, though. So if you want to keep reading, please consider becoming a subscriber: (please don’t make me join Substack.)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. Networking for Creatives DATE: Saturday, April 25th, 2026 TIME: 4:30PM - 6:30 PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 Price: FREE Join artists Leslie Archibald and Holly Lyn Walrath for a guided networking event for creatives of all practices. Whether you're an artist, a writer, a photographer, a content creator, or simply a dreamer, you'll meet other creative individuals who want to expand their network. You never know what collaboration might come from meeting other artists! This event includes free refreshments! Sip + Create: Junk Journaling  DATE: Saturday, May 9th, 2026 ​TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ Junk journaling is the playful, easy art of transforming everyday paper scraps and forgotten ephemera into a meaningful, visual record of your life. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll celebrate imperfection, curiosity, and creativity by giving new purpose to materials that might otherwise be tossed away. Receipts, catalogues, magazines, napkins, seed packets, book pages, postage stamps, junk mail, greeting cards, scraps of lace, packaging, old wallpaper—if it feels like junk to you, it’s exactly what we want to work with. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Sip + Create Van Gogh's Sunflowers DATE: Saturday, July 11th, 2026 TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ In this writing + art workshop, we'll explore one of the most iconic artists of all time: Vincent Van Gogh. Inspired by Van Gogh's famous sunflowers, we'll paint sunny summer sunflowers and incorporate Van Gogh's writing into our creative practice. Van Gogh was not only a talented painter but also a lifelong letter writer. This unique workshop will give you an opportunity to learn about Van Gogh's life and create a piece of art in the spirit of one of the most popular artists in history.

Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Sip + Create: National Poetry Month Blackout Poetry DATE: Saturday, April 11th, 2026 ​ TIME: 7:00PM - 9:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 In celebration of National Poetry Month, learn how to create your own blackout poetry. Play with words and art by erasing words on the page to form a poem. Explore the history of blackout poetry and learn how it defies genre, questions texts and sources, and provides ample play room for writers looking for inspiration. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Sip + Create Pride Party DATE: Saturday, June 13, 2026 TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ "What I liked about the rainbow is that it fits all of us. It's all the colors. It represents all the genders. It represents all the races. It's the rainbow of humanity" --Gilbert Baker, designer of the Pride flag. Paint the rainbow with this fun art + writing workshop in celebration of Pride Month. In this workshop, we'll write about the queer experience, gender, and identity. Then, we'll pair our writing with a rainbow-colored piece of art. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

Wow, you made it all the way down here. Have a sarcastic, not at all serious comic on art. (Seriously, don’t get mad at me if you laugh. Or cry...)

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Welcome back to my series on practical ways to finish your book using the power of psychology. Each post in this ten-part series presents a different method you can try to finally just GET IT DONE and WRITE THE FRIGGIN BOOK. If you haven’t read the other articles in this series, you can check them out below:

• Part One: JUST DO IT

• Part Two: If-Then Planning

• Part Three: Trick Yourself

• Part Four: Gamify: Make Writing Fun

• Part Five: Manifesting Your Goals

• Part Six: Make a 6-Point To-Do List

When I first started running, I came up with an unhinged plan to run every day. I was going to run two miles a day for a month so that I could work up to a 5k. Of course, this quickly crumbled when I realized how frigging hard running is (for me, anyway). I didn’t give up, I kept running, I just scaled that goal back to one day a week. I started interspersing my runs with other exercises: Yoga, weightlifting, and workout classes at my gym.

I quickly realized that everything feeds into everything else. By doing different types of exercises, I was better able to run because I was more flexible and stronger.

All of this being said, I’m someone who has a chronic illness. I have lymphedema, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos (EDS), recurring infections, and severe allergies, including idiopathic hives. So running every day was simply unrealistic given my body. Because I’m chronically ill, I often need breaks. There are whole weeks when I can’t exercise. At first, I would get really frustrated by these breaks. I still do, to be honest. But I’ve realized I can’t push my body beyond pain—that just results in more pain. The truth is, we all need breaks as humans.

And as a writer, you need breaks, too. And here’s a stunner of a surprise: Breaks actually help you write better.

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect is the idea that an interrupted task is actually more readily recalled. The idea is that “multitasking” or doing one task, taking a break to do something else, then coming back to the task, can actually help you focus better.

Zeigarnik was a psychologist who came up with the idea after a study where they asked a waiter to remember orders. They were surprised to find that the waiter could remember unpaid, pending orders, but they couldn’t remember finished orders. Waiters juggle multiple orders with ease, getting constantly interrupted, but they can still remember who hasn’t paid yet.

The idea is that as humans, our brains don’t remember the things we’ve accomplished. We only remember that which we need to complete: Our to-do list. We don’t celebrate the successes.

This is kind of devastating because psychologically, it means that negative thoughts and self-doubt have priority in our brains. It’s a lot easier to think: I didn’t make my goal this week, so I suck. I didn’t get to run (even though it wasn’t my fault because I was sick), so I’m bad at running.

Let’s apply this to writing. There are two takeaways from the Zeigarnik effect. The first is that interruptions are actually beneficial to a goal. If you struggle to focus while completing a long writing session, it might actually help to juxtapose that writing with something else.

I personally use this concept to juggle multiple writing projects. I find that if I’m bored with one writing project, starting a new one can actually help me finish the first because it gives my brain something different to work on. Sure, I might have a lot of unfinished projects. But why is that inherently bad? Successful bestselling authors usually have more than one project going on. They might be writing a draft while revising another and completing proofreading on still another, while marketing the book they wrote five years ago that is now being published.

In fact, I’m doing this right now, as I write this post. I have this window up while I switch back to workshop critiques for a class I’m teaching.

This juggling can be really overwhelming for a new writer. It’s a “leveled up” writing skill that takes time to get good at. Juggling many projects at once requires you to switch gears quickly, perhaps moving from one storyline to another or even one genre to another. And like all writing advice, it doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who struggles with distractions, you might do better to narrow your focus. You might try just allowing yourself to take a break entirely from a project.

As an editor, I often see writers struggling with this. They toil over one project forever, never working on anything else, never writing the next thing, and in the end, that one project becomes gobbledy-gook. My role then is to help them see the work with some distance.

Taking breaks has benefits for revision. Coming back to a project after, say, a few weeks, can let you see it with more objective eyes.

The second takeaway from the Zeigarnik effect is about to-do lists. (What do you mean, Holly, you’re going to talk about to-do lists AGAIN??!) The reason I harp so much on to-do lists for writers is that they work. Constantly re-evaluating your goals helps you shape your task list for a project. It’s important to stay present in your writing life. By acknowledging what you have left to do, your brain will start to think about ways to accomplish that goal.

Awareness is so vital to a writer’s goals. It’s not just about building an awareness of your style and process: but about being aware of your pitfalls, too.

Most new writers lack awareness of not just their writing but also their process. They write a story, but don’t know why a character acted a certain way. “My characters just do what they want!” And while it’s normal for your imagination to surprise you, in the end, you’re in charge. You’re the writer, here. New writers don’t know why they chose a setting or a plot element. But for readers, everything has to feel cohesive and tied together, otherwise the reader is thinking: WHAT the heck is going on in this book? You want the reader to feel impressed by the book, not confused. As writers, we need to be aware of the choices we make.

The Five Minute Brain Break is a method developed by researchers at the University of Sydney to refocus attention. If you find yourself distracted, you might try this simple technique. Take five minutes and do nothing. Set a timer (you might even work this into your regular routine by setting a Pomodoro timer to take a break after 25 minutes of work). During that time, go somewhere other than your computer. Sit quietly and relax your mind. If you need help, try simply thinking “I am breathing” or “I am taking a break”.

It’s okay to spend your break thinking about your project. In fact, that is the point of the break. One study found that during such breaks, the brain wasn’t idle. It was actually churning through the task at a super-high speed of over two dozen times in ten seconds. That’s astonishing to think about. So even if you’re trying to hold, say, a novel in your mind—which is a really big project, your brain is capable of that!

Taking a break is a big part of my creative process. In fact, I use it for all my poetry writing. I write a poem, stick it in a folder, and then return to it the next year to revise. That’s right: I give my poems whole years before I revise them. Why? Because in a year, I’ve changed, and the poem has changed. It’s shocking how some of my poems feel illegible after a year, while others surprise me with how good they are. This helps me look at the poems through a new lens.

I take more breaks now with my exercise, too. I’ve realized the mind and the body are similar: They need time to refuel, refresh, and grow.

Try this journaling exercise: Make a list of everything you have done so far on your project. What have you achieved? Spend some time allowing yourself to celebrate your successes. Now consider: Do I need a break? Are there other projects I can work on that might feed into this one? How can I “level up” to be able to work on more than one project at once? (This might include working revision into your normal drafting routine or finding a critique group to balance drafting with receiving feedback.) Do I need to work more routine breaks into my writing sessions?

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Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Sip + Create: Writing the Love Poem DATE: Saturday, February 14th TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​Show the one you love how much you care with the most personal gift possible: A custom Valentine featuring a love poem in your own words. Whether you're celebrating a partner, friend, or your own beautiful self, this event will help you find the words to tell someone how much you care. Featuring a make-your-own Valentine art experience and Valentine-themed drinks. Couples welcome! The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. Sip + Create: Junk Journaling  DATE: Saturday, May 9th, 2026 ​TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ Junk journaling is the playful, easy art of transforming everyday paper scraps and forgotten ephemera into a meaningful, visual record of your life. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll celebrate imperfection, curiosity, and creativity by giving new purpose to materials that might otherwise be tossed away. Receipts, catalogues, magazines, napkins, seed packets, book pages, postage stamps, junk mail, greeting cards, scraps of lace, packaging, old wallpaper—if it feels like junk to you, it’s exactly what we want to work with. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry.

30 Genres in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting January 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Get ready to discover the magic of different genres in this fun and interactive 30-day workshop tailored for short story writers. Whether you’re into mystery, romance, horror, or science fiction, this workshop will help you grasp the unique elements and essentials of each genre. Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Sip + Create: National Poetry Month Blackout Poetry DATE: Saturday, April 11th, 2026 ​ TIME: 7:00PM - 9:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 In celebration of National Poetry Month, learn how to create your own blackout poetry. Play with words and art by erasing words on the page to form a poem. Explore the history of blackout poetry and learn how it defies genre, questions texts and sources, and provides ample play room for writers looking for inspiration. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

For millennia, the love poem has been the most popular form of poetry in existence. It predates most other forms of literature, as far back as the Song of Songs, Rumi, and Shakespeare. As soon as people figured out how to put pen to paper (or chisel to stone), they started writing about love.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records (and you know, scholars), the oldest love poem is often believed to be “The Love Song for Shu-Sin” (c. 2000 BCE). This over four-thousand-year-old Sumerian stone tablet records what is both ancient rite and love song—a recording of a ritual where the King (Shu-Sin) would make sweet sweet music with a priestess of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of love.

A lot of people have tried their hand at writing love poems, and most poets start out by writing the love poem. Yet the idea that love poems are in some way cringeworthy is a prevailing concept that prevents writers from trying this age-old form. After all, how do you say anything new on the age-old topic of love? And how do you write a love poem for someone you care about that isn’t cliche?

Here’s the truth from a part-time poet: The secret is in knowing the object of your desire.

That is the topic of my upcoming workshop in-person at Merge Art Studio in Houston, Texas.

Sip + Create: Writing the Love Poem
DATE: Saturday, February 14th
TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM
LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126
A themed art night for creatives.
​Show the one you love how much you care with the most personal gift possible: A custom Valentine featuring a love poem in your own words. Whether you're celebrating a partner, friend, or your own beautiful self, this event will help you find the words to tell someone how much you care. Featuring a make-your-own Valentine art experience and Valentine-themed drinks. Couples welcome!

Why should you try writing a love poem in this day and age? Well, beyond the fact that it’s fun to write about things you love (and you should always write what you love), the truth is that we live in a world of diminishing authenticity. If you’re worried you might not be able to write an original poem, let me clue you into a little secret: Originality is not perfection.

I have a theory I’ve explained to my spouse far more times than he’d like to count, and it’s that the world is too interested in aesthetic these days. Not to sound like Ye Olde Ranter, but social media has perpetuated the idea that all things must be pretty and Instagrammable.

Let me give you an example. My spouse and I often like to spend a night in town to see a show. We used to stay at a crappy motel that was just enough off the beaten path from downtown to be Uber-able, but also hip and fun. This place had strong margaritas, unfancy tacos, and a 1960s-style motor-inn pool filled with beautiful people and loud hip-hop music blasting from the bar. The rooms were anything but fancy, but every time we stayed there, we had a blast—and it became a routine romantic getaway spot for us.

Of course, in the way of capitalism, it got bought out and quickly went sideways. All the fun and originality were squeezed out of it in favor of a bland beige color scheme, watered-down drinks, and a million add-on fees. What made it unique was squashed.

When my spouse and I were first dating, we often spent our time at the dollar movie, the local Pizza Hut with its 90s selection on the Juke Box, or simply hanging out at a park with a picnic. It’s these memories that stick with me. They are particular to us, and they will someday probably form a poem that’s an ode to all things cheap and not-shiny, to the simple attractions in life, to the person who I loved being with even when we couldn’t afford the aesthetic.

It might seem strange to write a love poem that’s part ode to the crappy motel, but to my spouse, it’s a little secret message. I miss that time, I remember the fun we had, even when we couldn’t afford to do something fancy. These days, we can afford to stay at nicer places. This last weekend, we hit up a local Houston speakeasy with a beautiful, meticulous garden. And while the drinks were nice and the ambiance nicer, it didn’t quite have that special vibe.

Of course, someone else might feel entirely differently based on their experiences, the memories, and weird little moments that make up a relationship: That is the stuff of poetry.

Things that feel fresh and authentic are often also rough around the edges. If we put aside the goal of writing something just right and instead focus on writing something that would please the person we are writing for, then it gets a lot easier.

In the end, you might achieve both originality and imperfect perfection: A poem that feels perfect for the person you love.

To that end, here’s a simple writing prompt to help you write a love poem to someone you love.

Writing the Love Poem: Know the Object of Your Affections

Whether you’re writing a poem to a lover, friend, or family member, the key is to focus on centering that person in your poem. Consider their interests, hobbies, weird little quirks, and what makes them special to you.

Intimacy is hard to quantify. Relationships are made up of a thousand little shared moments specific to the person you’re with. Make your love poem a private shared world between two people with a history.

1. Think about a specific memory you shared with this person. Write a few lines about that memory, or if you get stuck, start with “I remember the time…”

2. Brainstorm three words that describe the person. Are they funny? Kind? Confident? Shy? Get abstract: What color describes the person you love? If they were an animal, what kind would they be?

3. What is the person you love’s biggest fear? If you could take away one pain they have, what would it be?

4. What do you wish you could ask the person you love? What is one thing you want them to know if you died tomorrow?

Don’t worry about your poem being too cliche or sappy. The point of a love poem when it’s written for someone else is to connect with that person. They’ll love it simply because you took the time to write it. Everyone wants to feel loved, especially by those who most matter to them.

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Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Sip + Create: Writing the Love Poem DATE: Saturday, February 14th TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​Show the one you love how much you care with the most personal gift possible: A custom Valentine featuring a love poem in your own words. Whether you're celebrating a partner, friend, or your own beautiful self, this event will help you find the words to tell someone how much you care. Featuring a make-your-own Valentine art experience and Valentine-themed drinks. Couples welcome! The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. Sip + Create: Junk Journaling  DATE: Saturday, May 9th, 2026 ​TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ Junk journaling is the playful, easy art of transforming everyday paper scraps and forgotten ephemera into a meaningful, visual record of your life. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll celebrate imperfection, curiosity, and creativity by giving new purpose to materials that might otherwise be tossed away. Receipts, catalogues, magazines, napkins, seed packets, book pages, postage stamps, junk mail, greeting cards, scraps of lace, packaging, old wallpaper—if it feels like junk to you, it’s exactly what we want to work with. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Sip + Create Van Gogh's Sunflowers DATE: Saturday, July 11th, 2026 TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ In this writing + art workshop, we'll explore one of the most iconic artists of all time: Vincent Van Gogh. Inspired by Van Gogh's famous sunflowers, we'll paint sunny summer sunflowers and incorporate Van Gogh's writing into our creative practice. Van Gogh was not only a talented painter but also a lifelong letter writer. This unique workshop will give you an opportunity to learn about Van Gogh's life and create a piece of art in the spirit of one of the most popular artists in history.

30 Genres in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting January 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Get ready to discover the magic of different genres in this fun and interactive 30-day workshop tailored for short story writers. Whether you’re into mystery, romance, horror, or science fiction, this workshop will help you grasp the unique elements and essentials of each genre. Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Sip + Create: National Poetry Month Blackout Poetry DATE: Saturday, April 11th, 2026 ​ TIME: 7:00PM - 9:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 In celebration of National Poetry Month, learn how to create your own blackout poetry. Play with words and art by erasing words on the page to form a poem. Explore the history of blackout poetry and learn how it defies genre, questions texts and sources, and provides ample play room for writers looking for inspiration. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Sip + Create Pride Party DATE: Saturday, June 13, 2026 TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ "What I liked about the rainbow is that it fits all of us. It's all the colors. It represents all the genders. It represents all the races. It's the rainbow of humanity" —Gilbert Baker, designer of the Pride flag. Paint the rainbow with this fun art + writing workshop in celebration of Pride Month. In this workshop, we'll write about the queer experience, gender, and identity. Then, we'll pair our writing with a rainbow-colored piece of art. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

The first title I had for this post was “Everything is awful, but I keep coming back to writing.” And while that’s true, I’m spending less time writing these days than ever. I’m spending a lot of time on self-care, and it is very hard not to let that time feel wasted. But what I’ve realized is that I have to take care of myself or I can’t create.

As humans living in a technological society where our attention is constantly being divided and demanded, not to mention a world that’s constantly in turmoil, and a news cycle that’s 90% whiplash, 9% trauma, and less than 1% hopecore, more than ever, we have to find ways to survive.

What Is Ekphrasis?

In the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, we find what most consider the first ever instance of ekphrasis: The description of art using writing. The ancient god of fire and the forge, Hephaestus, creates a shield for the great hero Achilles. And while the shield is imaginary, its detailed description makes it feel real, or perhaps beyond real, since the shield is said to have images of cities, wars, dancers, fields of grain, vineyards, and herds of marching oxen. Even as far back as the earliest literature, writers utilized the tool of image to draw a reader into a story.

Image is the basis of all fictional writing: it lets the reader imagine a scene, a character, a place. The writer who can’t express an image can’t write. One way to practice creating vivid images is via ekphrasis.

This is the subject of my upcoming writing workshop starting in March. Entirely online, this workshop meets four times in March with interactive Zoom sessions focused on helping writers learn to see like an artist.

“Then first he form’d the immense and solid shield; Rich various artifice emblazed the field; Its utmost verge a threefold circle bound; A silver chain suspends the massy round; Five ample plates the broad expanse compose, And godlike labours on the surface rose. There shone the image of the master-mind: There earth, there heaven, there ocean he design’d; The unwearied sun, the moon completely round; The starry lights that heaven’s high convex crown’d; The Pleiads, Hyads, with the northern team; And great Orion’s more refulgent beam; To which, around the axle of the sky, The Bear, revolving, points his golden eye, Still shines exalted on the ethereal plain, Nor bathes his blazing forehead in the main.” —The Iliad, Homer, Book 18

Hephaestus presents Achilles' new armor to Thetis (Iliad, XVIII, 617). Attic red-figure Kylix, 490-480 BCE by the Foundry Painter.

In its earliest usage, the term ekphrasis dates back to Greek and Roman scholars. The term comes from the Greek word “ekphrázein”, which means “to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.” Ekphrasis was highly studied and even had complex rules for describing anything. The goal was to create a vivid mental image that stirred the reader’s emotions.

Early orators also used images in their mind to organize an argument. This was called “ars memoria” and continues today in how students memorize basic concepts using Mnemonic devices.

Ancient Greek Orator Demosthenes, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)

Today, we use the word “ekphrastic” to refer to any writing that describes art. “Writing” and “art” are both loose terms here. An ekphrastic writing might be inspired by and describe a famous work of art like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. But ekphrasis contains multitudes: I’ve also seen fan fiction described as ekphrastic. It’s common to use ekphrasis to describe other works like music, landscapes, or architecture.

The most common form of ekphrasis is poetry. There’s something particular about a poem’s ability to encapsulate a work of art in just a few lines that a longer story might struggle to recreate. I think this is in part because poetry at its heart can be about description and image, while story is rooted in narrative. Ekphrastic poets often describe a work of art, while ekphrastic storyists make a narrative out of the art, imagining the characters as real, living people. Both are worthwhile methods to explore when trying out ekphrasis as a writer.

One poetry form that uses ekphrasis is the ode. It is often used to describe a person, place, or object, but is more commonly used to describe art.

The most well-known Ode is probably John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, written after Keats visited the British Museum with friend and painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. There, the two visited the department of antiquities, and Keats wrote a series of Odes based on the experience. Keats’ poem seems to suggest that the value of art is that it lives on even when humans have died:

“When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

[Photograph: Vase of Sosibios, Louvre, Townley Vase, British Museum]

While not directly inspired by a specific painting, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel inspired by art. In 1884, Oscar Wilde visited the studio of Basil Ward, a painter working on a portrait of a beautiful young man. “What a pity that such a glorious creature should ever grow old!” Wilde remarked. Basil Ward agreed and added, “How delightful it would be if he could remain exactly as he is, while the portrait aged and withered in his stead!” Wilde would go on to put Basil Ward in his story as the painter Basil Hallward, and the plot mirrored the exchange.

Wilde’s book has one of the most fascinating descriptions of an imaginary painting ever written, as the protagonist in the book stays young forever while his portrait ages (and shows evidence of his moral depravity). For obvious reasons, it has also inspired many paintings:

“He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before—and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped—blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? ... No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.” —The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1943–44, Ivan Albright (1897-1983)

Art criticism and the art essay have also been seen as ekphrasis. Yet writing that aims to critique should perhaps be put in a different category.  The central aim of the ekphrastic work is not to cast judgment, but to create an entirely new and original work inspired by the first.

From medieval times through the Renaissance, highly descriptive writing was the norm. Writers like Edmund Spenser used heavy, flowery description in works like the Faerie Queene (1590). These passages of description went on and on, and probably feel difficult to comprehend for the modern reader.

As writing evolved, a simpler approach became more popular, and these days it is common for writers to receive advice to avoid “purple prose”. Writers are taught to be as sparse as possible, “like Hemingway”, aiming for “showing, not telling”. The downfall of this focus on scarcity is that it limits the writer’s ability to craft image. Writers don’t learn the art of description, which is in many ways where the writer’s best skills should lie.

Yet time and again, writers return to ekphrasis, the art of describing art. It’s my fundamental belief that all forms of art—from writing to painting to photography to knitting—benefit from a deep engagement with other art forms. This borrowing and inspiring and acknowledgement of a wider world of art serves as a kind of living ecosystem where everything is in conversation with everything else.

A conversation goes two ways. And that is the aim of a good ekphrastic piece: To talk to the past. 

Why Ekphrasis?

Early writers used ekphrasis because images were rare. It’s hard to believe that in today’s image-heavy world. In the palm of our hands, we can pull up the Mona Lisa and zoom in to view Da Vinci’s hidden message in her iris. On a computer in our lap, we can take an interactive tour of the Louvre. Many people live in a city with a museum where art is on display and can be viewed by anyone. Works of art that once hung on a rich man’s wall are now democratized (insomuch as museum access is democratized by free ticket days and school visits).

In ancient history, artistic renditions were for the few and privileged. Access to art has grown exponentially with the advent of the internet and museums open to the public. Ekphasis was a necessary tool before this because it helped the average person see art.

In today’s world where anyone can view a work of art: What role does ekphrasis have? Why bother learning to describe art?

The Power of Description in Learning

One surprising thing I’ve learned teaching art and writing is that not everyone knows how to look at a piece of art, let alone how to write about it. Before you can describe something, you have to be able to observe it.

This isn’t to say that there is a wrong or right way to look at art. But many people often feel that art, like writing, is inaccessible. They look at a work of visual art and don’t know how to react, or even what they are looking at. They feel they have to understand how the art was made before they can relate to it. Reading the little label next to the art is often unhelpful because it may not explain the key aspects of the art. Or it may explain the art, but not the context of who made it, when, and why. The viewer might wish for an authority figure, someone with experience who can demystify the art.

That privilege of who gets to see art still exists today because while art is more available, our ability to interpret it has fallen away. That’s where ekphrasis can be helpful. Describing something is often used as a method of learning. By describing what we see, we learn how to see it better.

Ekphrasis provides a way of having a deeper engagement with art. Like journaling about our feelings, writing about what we see in a piece of art can help us understand it. Simple conversations about an object can provide insight into its meaning.

In the art world, we call this “object-based learning.” It’s the concept that by discussing and describing an object to others, we are better able to connect with and learn about the object. Object-based learning can occur as a discussion or as ekphrasis: creating an artwork inspired by another artwork.

Writing about a piece of art suddenly forces the writer to use a new toolbox: color, texture, movement, figure, perspective—describing the elements of a painting asks the writer to expand their skillset.

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Beyond Description Lies the Personal

When writing about art, there’s a point where the writer goes beyond just description. While ekphrasis can be a simple description of an artwork, what makes a good piece of ekphrasis is personal connection.

After all, writing about art is a connection between the writer and the artist. If I took ten writers to the museum and asked them to choose a painting to write about, they would probably all choose different works of art based on what they like.

Think of the amateur painter. They might start out by trying to truthfully depict what they see on the page. They might copy other works, trying to learn the basic techniques of brush to paper. But once the basics are mastered, the amateur becomes a master by creating their own unique style.

Writing works the same way, and to be a good ekphrastic writer means you bring something of yourself to the page. Really excellent ekphrastic works contain a few simple elements:

• A description of the artwork in the writer’s own voice and style.

•  A narrative or story told about or inspired by the artwork.

• A personal connection that makes the experience unique.

After all, we couldn’t love John Keats’ simple poem on a Grecian urn if we didn’t also love Keats himself. When we learn that Keats was an orphan (having lost his father, brother, and mother) and only 23 at its writing, the lines praising the urn for its ability to live forever give new insight into the grieving young man who would die only a few years after writing the now-famous poem.

And Oscar Wilde’s portrayal of a flamboyant, flippant young man has formed the basis for an entire queer persona. The “dandy” Wilde played in life was just as tragic as Dorian Gray, in many ways, obsessed with beauty and secretly concerned with how the world might view his hidden transgressions.

Ekphrasis isn’t just a mode in which the writer can develop their description skills. It’s also a way of connecting with the world, of imprinting your personal voice and style onto a larger conversation.

References

(Rippl, Gabriele. "Ekphrasis." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. Oxford University Press, 2022. https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.rice.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780190699604.001.0001/acref-9780190699604-e-1057.)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Sip + Create: Writing the Love Poem DATE: Saturday, February 14th TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​Show the one you love how much you care with the most personal gift possible: A custom Valentine featuring a love poem in your own words. Whether you're celebrating a partner, friend, or your own beautiful self, this event will help you find the words to tell someone how much you care. Featuring a make-your-own Valentine art experience and Valentine-themed drinks. Couples welcome! The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. Sip + Create: Junk Journaling  DATE: Saturday, May 9th, 2026 ​TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 ​ Junk journaling is the playful, easy art of transforming everyday paper scraps and forgotten ephemera into a meaningful, visual record of your life. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll celebrate imperfection, curiosity, and creativity by giving new purpose to materials that might otherwise be tossed away. Receipts, catalogues, magazines, napkins, seed packets, book pages, postage stamps, junk mail, greeting cards, scraps of lace, packaging, old wallpaper—if it feels like junk to you, it’s exactly what we want to work with. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry.

30 Genres in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting January 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Get ready to discover the magic of different genres in this fun and interactive 30-day workshop tailored for short story writers. Whether you’re into mystery, romance, horror, or science fiction, this workshop will help you grasp the unique elements and essentials of each genre. Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Sip + Create: National Poetry Month Blackout Poetry DATE: Saturday, April 11th, 2026 ​ TIME: 7:00PM - 9:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 In celebration of National Poetry Month, learn how to create your own blackout poetry. Play with words and art by erasing words on the page to form a poem. Explore the history of blackout poetry and learn how it defies genre, questions texts and sources, and provides ample play room for writers looking for inspiration. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

What sparks your creativity?

What makes you excited to sit down and do the work—whether it’s writing, creating, or even letting your brain relax for a bit to dream?

What’s bringing you joy and light in 2026?

These are the questions I’m diving into with a brand new, somewhat terrifying adventure I’m starting in 2026. I’m excited to announce that in December, I signed a lease on a little artist studio located in the heart of Houston. That’s right, I’m taking my art into a new place—literally. And guess what? You’re coming with me, lovelies.

For a long time, I’ve struggled to feel excited about creating art. Writing—sure, it’s always there for me, and I think I’ll always be someone who writes regularly. But lately, I’ve struggled to find time for creative inspiration. Visiting museums. Playing around with new mediums. Trying new things. Experimenting. Collaborating. Reading books for creatives. Visiting bookstores. Talking to other writers and creatives. These are all what I call “creative inputs”.

You can do the work by sitting down and putting your nose to the grindstone, and that will work, but after a while, you may find your nose has fallen off. Ouch. A faster, and much more fun way, is through creative inputs.

Creative inputs help you find the spark in your work—whatever it may be. I often find that the people who attend my workshops in person tell me some variation on: “I needed this. I was stagnant with my creative process, and now I feel like I’ve found my spark again.” Most of us work day jobs that suck the light out of us.

Finding that spark is the topic of my new in-person creative workshop, happening January 10th at my new art studio:

Register for my latest in-person workshop, happening January 10th in Houston, Texas at Merge Art Studio

It’s a term I borrowed from Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook. In it, VanderMeer lists different places inspiration can come from—family, the environment, personal experience, religion, research, luck/chance, and other texts. I’ve used all of these as inspiration in the past. There are dark inspiration points, and there are light inspiration points. Trauma can be an inspiration, but reliving it can be challenging.

As kids, we get to play. I remember growing up in the 90s and spending every day in a sun-kissed summer vacation where I went to the pool, read books on my roof while tanning, and hung out with friends who made up involved, intricate adventure stories.

I was a narrative artist even then, but I never realized how much I would miss that feeling of whimsy and freedom.

For me, the only way to recapture that and get re-inspired in my work is by creative experimentation.

From Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook

I remember serving on a panel once where another writer was asked if he ever experimented with his writing. He frankly insisted that such a thing was not necessary. “I’m not here to experiment, I’m here to make money.” He explained that writing was only an ends to a means for him—and any time he spent went into writing that would one day “pay off.” He saw no value in experimenting because he knew what worked. And while that worked for him, I knew it would make me miserable.

I totally understand where he might have been coming from—we all want to hope that our creative endeavors will become careers. And it’s totally fine to stick to what you love—if it makes you happy. (This guy did NOT sound happy!) But the truth is, flexibility matters more than a focus on some economic goal.

For me, trying new things is a joy. I might fail. I might suck at it, at first. I might struggle. But most of the time, that’s okay. I hear a lot of creatives worry about trying new things. Shouldn’t I have a voice? Shouldn’t I have a niche?

Maybe, but maybe not.

Sadly, a lot of our creative world wants to force people into a box. TikTok is a great example. It forces creators into a specific niche. People find similar videos comforting, so artists end up creating the same type of videos over and over again. And while that can work for the algorithm, it can also burn you out. If you never try anything new, you never grow. You never fail—and thus, you never learn.

The reality is that what makes your work special is YOU.

Austin Kleon, “Don’t Worry About Unity”

I’m a creative who dabbles across genres. I write, but I also paint. I take film photographs, and I also make haiku out of those photographs. I make erasure poems or “poem paintings” that merge text and paint. I write prose poetry and speculative creative nonfiction. Most of what I do is some merging of art and words.

So for a long time, I’ve struggled to figure out what my “voice” is. I am still figuring that out. I hope to be figuring it out for years to come. I worried early on that I wasn’t doing anything recognizable. And maybe I’m not. But I’m doing what I love, and that’s something entirely different.

Doing what you love is, actually, as it turns out, a lot of frigging work. You might find yourself in the midst of a project, look around, and realize it no longer brings you joy. You might find you love something so much that you don’t know how to rein it in and focus. You might find that what you thought you loved is actually really hard—and thus you have to work hard to do it.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have my own art studio. My own space to host other creatives and dream and paint and get messy and write and do what I love.

Large-scale erasure poems by Holly Lyn Walrath, erasure of “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” by Linda Nochlin

Poem + Photography still of Houston strip mall at night, taken with a 1959 Ambi Silette using low-light film

A “cover up” poem of La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats (1819), using art by Frank Dicksee

It’s time to stop assigning meaning to what we do and instead focus on why we do it. The world is a mess, and in the end, doing what you love is the only thing that matters. We have so little time. So little words in us. So little space to create.

Virginia Woolf once said, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Well, that room of my own is finally manifested this year. Will the money follow? I’m operating on the “build it and they will come” policy (it has never steered me wrong.)

I haven’t been this excited about a new endeavor in a long time. I can’t wait to share the journey with you. Thanks for being here with me.

This is me telling you that in 2026, I give you permission to find what sparks your joy. Glow up, baby.

Love what I do? Consider upgrading for just $25/year to support The Weird Circular, hosted by me, Holly Lyn Walrath.

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Sip + Create Glow Party DATE: Saturday, January 10th TIME: 6:00PM - 8:00PM LOCATION: Merge Art Studio, 2000 Nance St. Studio B-126 A themed art night for creatives. Celebrate the new year with light and joy at this fun Sip + Create Glow Party. This workshop is a creative exploration merging art and words and is meant for creatives of all genres and backgrounds--painters, writers, doodlers, crafters, poets, and dreamers. Led by narrative artist Holly Lyn Walrath, participants will come together to make art that glows. No art or writing experience is necessary--just bring your spark. All supplies are provided. Let's sip, shine, and create! The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry.

30 Genres in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting January 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Get ready to discover the magic of different genres in this fun and interactive 30-day workshop tailored for short story writers. Whether you’re into mystery, romance, horror, or science fiction, this workshop will help you grasp the unique elements and essentials of each genre. Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

I’m once again sharing my year-end round-up of things I wrote, created, and loved in 2025. If you enjoyed anything I wrote, I would love consideration for awards that you might be nominating in!

The Speculative Poetry Initiative

And on the subject of awards, I’m delighted to say that I was a part of SFF award history this year. In 2025, we celebrated the first speculative poetry Hugo Award. Early in the year, myself and a group of speculative poets formed the Speculative Poetry Initiative. We organized and I’m happy to say, the goal of having a permanent Hugo for poetry passed its first round. We still need another vote in two years, so stay tuned, but I wanted to reflect a bit on it.

In SFF, awards have always left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. I am often baffled by the works that make major award lists because they are the same names, over and over again, and the works that are there are often not ones I would have chosen. But awards matter, to the authors who are nominated for them, and to the people who run them.

I think our award system in SFF could be A LOT better. Having a poetry Hugo is just one step toward that. There are other goals I would like to see accomplished in the future, like more award coverage for underrepresented genres like poetry, nonfiction, and flash fiction. One day, I may even get to be involved in widening the field even more.

For now, I thank everyone who supported SPI. It has meant a great deal to see poetry get more wider recognition in SFF.

No small part of why this matters to me is it’s an accomplishment. It’s so rare to be able to say I did something these days. I’m constantly struggling to get projects done. So to see this achieved meant a lot.

Speculative Poetry Initiative

What Are the Hugo Awards and Who Can Participate?

www.poetryhugo.com

Publications by Holly Lyn Walrath in 2025

• Short Story: “Every Son a Reaver”—A deliciously dark Morgana Le Fay story retelling the Death of Arthur from Morgana’s point of view. Published in Flame Tree Publishing’s Anthology Morgana Le Fay: New & Ancient Arthurian Tales

• Short Story: “Paper Dolls”—A little girl finds comfort in her collection of paper dolls, but as they become increasingly unhinged, she starts to question her own existence. Published in A Crack in the Code Anthology by Mocha Memoirs Press.

• Poem: “Climate Change Is a Poem”—a longer poem about how climate change impacts our world and our selves, from my experience living on the Gulf Coast. Published in Reckoning 9.

• Poem: “Ghost in the Shell”—a prose poem about my teenage self, who sometimes comes back to haunt me at the worst times. Queer af. Published in Radon Journal Issue 9.

• Nonfiction Essay: “Seven Lessons for My Past Self: On Running a Small Press”—An essay on what it’s like to run Interstellar Flight Press and how, in the end, I simply wouldn’t be able to do this without my volunteer crew. Published in the SFWA Blog Speculative Poetics series. (BTW, This series is open to pitches!)

• Nonfiction Essay: “Setting Is the Character: Writing Compelling Settings in Short Fiction.” Published by Writing Workshops.

• Nonfiction Essay: “The First Hugo for Poetry: An Interview with Marie Brennan”. Published in the SFWA Blog Speculative Poetics series. (BTW, This series is open to pitches!)

Works Edited by Holly Lyn Walrath in 2025:

• Novella: Club Magritte by Nicola Lombardi. Published by Interstellar Flight Press. 

• Short Story Collection: The House of Illusionists and Other Stories by Vanessa Fogg. Published by Interstellar Flight Press. Includes the first year of publication story “Sweetest”.

• Poetry Chapbook: Listen: A Poetic Creature by Griffin Rockwell. Published by Interstellar Flight Press.

• Short Nonfiction: You can find all the essays I edited over at Interstellar Flight Magazine.

Blog Posts and Articles by and About Holly Lyn Walrath in 2025

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Con-Verse: Chatting with Holly Lyn Walrath

In our continued chats with some of the brilliant minds in the speculative poetry space, today we're talking to poet and editor Holly Lyn Walrath!

seattlein2025.org/2025/04/28/con-verse-chatting-with-holly-lyn-walrath

This Heartbreaking 1888 Mermaid Poem Explores Child Death in the Most Haunting Way

In 1888, Woman's World, edited by Oscar Wilde, published this feminist speculative mermaid poem, a precursor to today's contemporary speculative poetry.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/1888-mermaid-poem

How to Get Started as a Freelance Book Editor

Ten Years Later, I'm Still in Love with Editing: Focusing Your Business on What You Love. What should you focus on when starting a freelance business? Learn to hone your skillset.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/freelance-editing

The Personal Impacts of Climate Change: A Poem About Intimacy

Poet Holly Lyn Walrath reads an unedited draft of the poem "Climate Change Is a Poem" and discusses the importance of pairing ecopoetry with personal identity.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/climate-change

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Five

This blog series by Holly Lyn Walrath explores ten tips for finishing your book inspired by psychology. Do you feel stuck in your project? Learn how to use the power of manifesting to meet your goals.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/manifesting

Figuring Out Your Character's WHY

How to Build Character Motivation on the Page

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/your-characters-why

Is Confessional Poetry Bad?

Confessional poetry, rooted in personal experiences, has sparked debates about its value. Critics argue it’s too self-centered, but many poets embrace personal writing as a means of connection and catharsis. Contemporary poetry often focuses on identity and personal stories, resonating with readers who seek authenticity. Despite criticisms, confessional poetry allows writers to explore emotion, identity, and trauma, fostering deeper reader connections.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/is-confessional-poetry-bad

The AI Writing "Boom" and the Myths That Surround It

LLMs Are Not AI, and They Certainly Aren't Toothpaste. A discussion of the AI Boom and its impact on creative artists and writers.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/theaiboom

Why Speculative Poetry Matters to SFF

Speculative Poetry Should Be a Permanent Hugo Award Category and the Nebula Award Should Recognize Poetry Books: The Importance of Speculative Poetry

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/speculative-poetry

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Four

How to gamify your creative process to finish a writing project. A series of articles for writers who need help finishing a book. Learn how to make writing fun again.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/gamify

What I Loved in 2025: A Photo Essay

1. My animals. This year, our house has been under renovation and our dogs have been sick about six times. It’s been a rough time, but my animals continue to be the one thing that I don’t hate in the world. Animals are always worth the time you put into them, unlike humans.

2. Zines. In November, I got to attend Zinefest. One of the Zines I premiered was this messy cut-up poem from the 2015 SNAP Benefit Guidelines. So many people came up to me and told me their stories of being on SNAP and why it mattered to them, and how they appreciated me making a zine about it. It was honestly so emotional, I never expected this little zine to have that impact.

3. Nature: I still love the natural world around me. Here is a little lizard who has been hanging out on our rotting pumpkin. I buy fresh pumpkins every year for decoration. Sometimes they rot out, and I add them to my garden for the critters and the plants to thrive on. Sometimes they survive, and I make dog treats out of them. This year, one rotted early, and the second I stuck it in the garden, here came this little dude.

4. Poetry. Oh, poems, I love you still. I’ll probably love you till the day I die. In fact, read a poem at my funeral. Read only poems. Make a poem out of my life, won’t you? (Below is an erasure poem I painted out of Charles’ Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Fun fact, the gingerbread house is modeled off of Charles Dickens’ writing house, The Swiss Chalet. It was a gift from a writer friend and arrived in 94 separate boxes on Christmas Eve. Dickens put it in his garden and built a tunnel under the road to access it. He died in it.)

5. The Moon. As a poet, I can safely say I never get tired of looking at the moon.

6. Publishing Books. It is an honor to get to work with all of the writers I do. It’s magic that they accept my feedback and make their work better because of it. It’s a frigging wonder that anything gets published in today’s world. Small press publishing matters a great deal to me, and I love it. Shout-out to everyone who came to the Interstellar Flight Press reading in Seattle!

7. Art. This summer I went to Worldcon in Seattle and got to visit the Chihuly Museum of glass art. Below is a self-portrait of me in one of the glass globes in the garden, with a bit of the Space Needle too! I also got to visit Paris, France, and the town where Van Gogh lived before he died. Art continues to inspire me and keep me alive. When I’m sad, I create something and then I feel better.

8. Hope. I’m endlessly hopeful. It’s hard to feel hope these days, but I’m constantly surprised by my own inner well of hope.

9. Silly things. Being silly continues to spark joy for me. What is the point of anything if you can’t have fun? There are a lot of fun-suckers in the world. My advice? Surround yourself with un-serious people.

10. Writing. Although I haven’t been able to write as much this year, writing remains something I love. I love the feeling of creating, of being surprised by my own brain. I love the writing community, and I love being around other writers.

11. Activism. It isn’t the right word to say I love having to organize around causes that matter to me. Activism doesn’t say what I love about it. Below is an erasure I made early in the year of Trump’s Presidential order on pronouns, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” In it, the pronoun “she” is not mentioned once. Art is how I respond to the world, and my art will always be political.

12. My Chaotic Life. This year, Chaos definitely reigned over my life. We spent most of the year renovating our house, a dusty, messy, stressful, costly mess of an experience. I also had COVID (again.) and major brain fog as a result, which I’m still recovering from. My good friend Chaos was back in top form. But IDK, maybe the older I get, the better I am at embracing her.

That’s what I loved and created this year. I wish you the very best for the new year—hope, joy, and light.

If you love what I do, consider upgrading to my newsletter for just $25/year. This helps me a great deal!

Welcome back to my series on practical ways to finish your book using the power of psychology. Each post in this ten-part series presents a different method you can try to finally just GET IT DONE and WRITE THE FRIGGIN BOOK. If you haven’t read the other articles in this series, you can check them out below:

• Part One: JUST DO IT

• Part Two: If-Then Planning

• Part Three: Trick Yourself

• Part Four: Gamify: Make Writing Fun

• Part Five: Manifesting Your Goals

Make a 6-Point To-Do List

When I started running, it was primarily because running is the only exercise that helps my busted knee feel stronger. But another main goal was physical fitness. I wanted to feel stronger. I’ve never been an athletic person. I wanted to feel like a person who could achieve things that are hard. I made a list of the things that matter in my life, including my family, writing and creative pursuits, my work, and so on. I realized that I had to make space for my self-care. When I started thinking about running as self-care, something snapped into place.

To me, writing has to have a place in your life for it to matter. I often say in my classes that writing isn’t just a hobby—it is a part of living, at least, for true writers. There are times in your life when you might not have time for writing, and that is okay. Sometimes, things like survival or money or family come first. I’ve found that if I think about writing as a part of my life—as something I do because I love it and it matters—then I am better able to care for myself as a creative person.

I’ve always been a fan of to-do lists. Hanging right now on my fridge is a grocery list, and next to it is the week’s meal plan, a simple list of what I want to make each day. When my spouse asks me what we need from the store, I say, “I don’t remember, it’s on the list.” The list becomes the memory keeper for me—a storage place for things I don’t want to have to remember because they feel too menial. But the funny thing is, if you asked me what was on the list right now, if I really had to remember (Let’s say a mysterious masked man was holding me at gunpoint, some kind of sinister grocery list assassin), I probably could tell you most of the things on the list. That’s because the list also helps me remember.

The mere act of writing a to-do list can be helpful for remembering things that matter. Psychologists call those things “unfulfilled goals”. I love that term because it’s what we’re after in this series. A book that isn’t finished isn’t a failure, it’s just unfulfilled. A 2011 study found that having tasks in your mind that weren’t written down somewhere could actually cause intrusive thoughts (Hi, have they been in my bed with me at midnight when I can’t sleep?). Not only that, the intrusive thoughts actually caused poor performance on other tasks. Making a plan to deal with the unfulfilled goals helped reduce the mental interference. (“Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals,” EJ Masicampo and Roy F Baumeister, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011).

Famously, Russian psychologists once did a study that found waiters could only remember the details of orders before they had been served. After they no longer needed to know the information, it went out of their heads. They also found that if someone started a to-do list but didn’t finish it, they couldn’t finish other tasks because their brain kept thinking about the to-do list! (“The Psychology of the To-Do List, Forbes)

My favorite form of journaling is just this: lists. Lists are endlessly useful. You can use them for anything in your writing life. But we’re here to talk about how to Finish The Book. For that, I recommend the 6-Point To-Do List.

You might be thinking: Holly, I know how to make a frigging to-do list. But this isn’t just that. The 6-point To-do list is basically a prioritization exercise. It gives you 6 important goals that you want to complete and then a to-do list of tasks for each goal. The point is to cluster your to-do lists by theme.

To clarify, it’s important to distinguish between a goal and a task. Goals are made up of tasks. Tasks can be done in a short timeframe, whereas goals are much bigger.

This is a great tool to try for a writing project because reaching a writing goal is multifaceted. It’s not just “finish the book,” but there might be several things on the list like “take a writing workshop,” “find a critique group,” “create a weekly writing date with a friend,” and so on.

Here’s a 6-Point To-Do List I recently started. One of my goals for 2026 is to focus more on my art-writing-related projects, and I will be opening a joint art studio with a friend. I always start with a title (the overall goal), and then I write the numbers 1-6. Each of the things on my list is a sub-goal for my overall goal. I can then use each of those to create a smaller, shorter to-do list for each sub-goal.

So for “move in” my sub to-do list might be 1. Gather my art from storage 2. Frame any unframed work 2. Pick up keys 3. Film hanging 4. Decide what supplies to bring 5. Hang bookshelves in the studio, etc.

Notice how I didn’t finish my list. I realized everything I needed to do fit under those four sub-goals. I may come back to this list later if more things come up that I need to do.

I find it helpful to make a to-do list each day in the morning before I start my work, but it can also be useful at other times. If you find your mind racing with tasks, you can make one before bed, and research shows you might fall asleep faster.

Are you an overachiever when it comes to to-do lists? If you find that you have lots of things on your list or you make too many lists, it might be helpful to add a “why”: A reason why that task matters to you right now.

• I need to finish my book by the end of the year so I can move on to my shiny new idea.

• I need to find a critique group so that I can get feedback on my new chapters.

• I need to spend more time marketing my book so it can have lots of pre-orders.

And so on. Notice how this is similar to the “If/Then” planning from my previous posts! You will feel more motivated to write if there is a result that will come of it!

Try this journal exercise: Write a 6-point to-do list for your book. Come up with the 6 goals you have as a writer. Now, create a to-do list of tasks that will help you meet those goals.

All of my 2026 workshops are live on my website!

And now for a word from our sponsor, who helps keep the metaphorical lights on…

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Into the Season of Liminality

Dearest Darkest Denizens,

I’d like to welcome you to the land beyond the veil. The time when time has no meaning, the space between holidays, the ephemeral world of almost-but-not-yet, a liminal world where waking up late and not knowing what day it is becomes the norm, a space between things, the place where darkness reigns.

This month, I spent a lovely time at Zinefest, where I wrote a few new Zines, including one in support of SNAP. I was struck by how it seemed to impact people. I was told story and story about how SNAP benefits matter. That made me feel like I was writing something that mattered. It made the darkness seem a little bit brighter.

I also have some potentially very cool big news coming in 2026—oh, I can’t tell you about it yet. But trust me, it’s gonna be BIG!

I don’t know about you, but I believe there are seasons of creativity. Sometimes they just aren’t clear to us as we’re entering them or when we’re in them. Which is to say, the best thing a creative can do is keep your head down and keep working. Try not to notice the ghosts floating by on the wind or the snow starting to fall. Instead, stay in that place where magic happens.

Write what you love, love what you write.

˙ ✩°˖🍂⋆｡˚꩜_🐿️🍁🍂🍃🌰🍠🥮🥧_☕🎃🎑🪁🏮.𖥔 ݁ ˖🍁๋࣭ ⭑🍂༘⋆

As a reminder, if you love what I do and want to support me, you can now upgrade to this newsletter to get extra-weird perks:

• At least one subscriber-only post per month

• Support me, your corporeal host, for less than a cup of coffee

• Bragging rights on being an absolute angel sent from heaven who loves freelancers and supports indie writers

• A 20% discount on any of my editing services

All of my 2026 workshops are live on my website!

Probably from PANK 💀

Every Weird Circular, I list upcoming opportunities to publish your writing geared toward writers of the weird (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative!) I prioritize PAID opportunities by markets I trust and try to vet as much as I can.

Upcoming Submission Windows:

• Android Press (founder of Solar Punk Magazine): No deadline. Novellas and Novels (up to 100k words). Query. Pays $500 plus 30% royalty.

• Eye to the Telescope: Deadline January 15, 2026. Theme: Immortality. Poetry (1-3 Poems). Pays $5-25 per poem).

• FemKu Mag: Deadline January 31, 2026. Haiku and related forms (4-8 poems), linked/hybrid poems. Limited demographic: Women poets. (Nonpaying).

• Ruadan Books, no deadline: Nonfiction Essays on Writing (1k-2k words). Pays $.10/word.

Need more submission ideas? Check the Grinder's newest markets, Duotrope's calendar, Submittable’s Discover Feature, Heavy Feather Review’s Where to Submit, SFPA's Speculative Poetry Markets, Horror Tree, Moksha's Open Publications, or The International Writer’s Collective Blog.

Photo by Alex Fu: https://www.pexels.com/photo/wide-road-with-street-lights-3289156/

Prompt #1: Liminal Words

One of my current creative projects is a series of short poems that I superimpose on photographs of liminal places. I’ve been using a random word generator, and I thought I’d share it with you. Pick 4-5 words and use them for inspiration in your piece.

Bonus Round: Liminal Places

Make a list of liminal spaces. Then pick three of them and write a story that has three parts, each set in one of the different liminal spaces.

Prompt #2: The In-Between

Write a piece that focuses on the edges of things. Where do your boundaries lie? What characters inhabit the in-between places? Where does time have no meaning? What is beyond the knowledge of science?

Bonus Round: Insert Villain

Now put a villain in your piece. They want to control something uncontrollable. They aim to damage or make perfect that which is undefinable. Bonus points if they have a pet cat.

Prompt #3: Darkness

Write a piece set in a dark place. The sewer. The bottom of the ocean. Space.

Bonus Round: Light-bringer

Now introduce a character who brings light (literally or metaphorically) to that place.

What I’m Consuming This Month (Literally, it’s in my brain-belly)

📖 Weird Book of the Month: Dungeon Crawler Carl

I’ll admit it, I’ve jumped on the Iron Tangle and I’m a Dungeon Crawler Carl fan. Not only is this series an excellent example of what a talented author can do with LitRPG genre elements, it’s also just really hilarious. I love what it does with humor, but also how it dips into the serious in spots. Dinosaurs, talking cats, foot fetish jokes, what’s not to love?

🧵 Craft Article of the Month: “Re-reading the Book I Never Published” by Delia Lloyd

I love Delia’s thoughts here on what it feels like to come back to a book after a very long period. I think a lot of writers have several “trunk” books waiting for them to level up as a writer and be able to revise them. Hell, I have about five. There’s some valuable advice here, but I would add that it IS possible to revise those manuscripts that have been abandoned. Never give up on your ideas.

🎵 Music to Write by: Lofi Girl Holiday Sessions

My favorite lofi channel, Lofi Girl, has its yearly holiday music channels up and they are a delight.

This newsletter is entirely run by me, Holly, your corporeal host. I’m just a bundle of anxiety shoved into a sweater and glasses, fueled by caffeine-free-zero-sugar Coke and feminine rage. I really, really love having you around, though. So if you want to keep reading, please consider becoming a subscriber: (please don’t make me join Substack.)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn​ Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. The Art of Ekphrasis: Writing with Visual Art DATE: 4 Zoom Meetings: March 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 10am-12pm CST, with asynchronous content via Writing Workshops ​ Ekphrasis is the art of writing in response to art. This generative workshop invites writers of all genres to explore the intersection of art and words. Through four guided observation sessions (taking place via Zoom), students will learn to pay attention to detail, describe what they see in vivid and unique ways, and grow their writing practice through art. Writers are observers at heart, and this class provides hands-on exercises to boost observation skills and break out of creative blocks. Fill up your well of inspiration through art. 30 Stories in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry.

30 Genres in 30 Days DATE: 4 Weeks Starting January 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Get ready to discover the magic of different genres in this fun and interactive 30-day workshop tailored for short story writers. Whether you’re into mystery, romance, horror, or science fiction, this workshop will help you grasp the unique elements and essentials of each genre. Revisioning Your Poems  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 6th, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops ​ Do you struggle to know when a poem is “done”? Do you have a ton of poems, but you’re not sure if they’re ready for publication? Do you need help learning how to edit your own work better? Join us for a nitty-gritty dive into the different methods of revising poetry. Learn how to self-edit for voice, form, structure, tone, and meter to re-envision your poems. Give life to your old drafts and prepare them for submission with help from a professional editor. Queer Poetics DATE: 4 Weeks Starting June 1, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream, like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Grow with Van Gogh: A 70-in-70 Challenge for Creatives  DATES: 10 Weeks Starting Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 TIME: Asynchronous via Writing Workshops Secluded in a small village outside of Paris, the famous impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh spent the final 70 days of his life doing what he loved: painting every day. This remarkable period and astonishing burst of creativity inspires this unique workshop. Grow with Van Gogh is a 70-day challenge for writers, artists, and all creatives looking to generate new work and push their boundaries.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

Wow, you made it all the way down here. Have an awkward gif.

One of my niche obsessions is speculative poetry, and more particularly, its rich history in science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines. While most people have probably read some of the more well-known authors of the “golden age” of science fiction, like Isaac Asimov or H.P. Lovecraft, few people know that this history goes back even further to the 1800s in Victorian England.

As part of my work on the Speculative Poetry Initiative (SPI), which aims to get a permanent speculative poetry Hugo Award, I’m researching the history of speculative poetry so that I can prove that speculative poetry has been a huge part of the landscape of SFFH from the beginning.

This week, I stumbled upon an early speculative poem that broke my heart.

“The Mer-Baby” by Violet Fane (penname of poet Mary Montgomerie Currie) was first published in 1888 in the proto-feminist publication, Woman’s World, edited by Oscar Wilde. Like most published women of the time, Fane came from the upper class and was the granddaughter of a Baronet (a rank just below Baron), and was married to a landowner and later a British ambassador. Fane was kind of a literary celebrity of her time, often holding soirées at her home in London. One male author referred to her as “something like a living poem for a certain group of friends,” while another called her a “sort of fashionable London Sappho” (LEDBETTER, KATHRYN. “Time and the Poetess: Violet Fane and ‘Fin-de-Siècle’ Poetry in Periodicals.” Victorian Poetry 52, no. 1 (2014): 141–59.)

Woman’s World is an important piece of feminist history. It was edited by Oscar Wilde, who took over editorship in 1887. He felt the magazine was “too feminine” and needed to examine not just women’s interests (chiefly, fashion) but “what they think, and what they feel.” Under Wilde’s direction, the magazine covered topics like higher education for women, the political status of women, “scientific” theories about gender and sex, and topics about gender in marriage. Wilde also changed the magazine’s cover image, which was previously the common Victorian image of a woman as a goddess, high on a pedestal, gazing at herself in the mirror. The new cover featured the contributor’s names at the center: full names and not married names (“Oscar Wilde and The Woman’s World: An Overview” by Petra Dierkes-Thrun). 

Magazines like Woman’s World regularly published speculative poetry. They ranged on a wide variety of topics, but the fiction and poetry magazines often focused on speculative topics that were somewhat scandalous or “low-brow,” like death and murder, pirates and adventure. The term “pulp” fiction comes from the “pulp” magazines, so called because the paper was made of cheap wood pulp. Some scholars refer to Argosy (1896) as the first pulp, but their history can be traced farther back to the “chapbooks” of the early 1800s, which often published folktales, ballads, nursery rhymes, children’s literature, and poetry. Chapbooks were often anonymous and meant for public consumption, so they often could cover more taboo topics.

The artwork that inspired Fane’s poem was by Dorothy Tennant. The artwork, shown at the Dudley Gallery for the first time in 1879, was described as “odd” or “queer”. Tennant often used street children as models, and “Mer-baby” was included in her book of illustrations depicting unhoused children, not always in such sad conditions but also at play or with their families. Like Oliver Twist, these depictions of real-life conditions for children were often meant to instill sympathy and were seen as a form of advocacy.

Image Courtesy Alison Chapman (ed.) and the DVPP team, “The Mer-Baby. (Suggested by a Picture by Miss Dorothy Tennant),” Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project, Edition 0.98.11beta , University of Victoria, 7th May 2025.

In Mer-baby, Tennant has painted the children nude (they are playing at the beach), in the style of the classical cherub, and they are struck by the dead child in their midst. Fane’s poem takes the image one step further. It tells the story of the dead mer-baby, found by two passing human children who tell their mother of the body. The mother then, in an act of compassion, buries the baby “near where her little daughters slept”.

Conditions for pregnant women in the 1880s were deplorable, and it was common to have more than one dead child. The mother in the poem has two—and now three, the orphan mer-baby she adopts after its death, laying it to rest, hoping that the mer-people might do the same if one of her family should die at sea (here, the father is the potenial victim—perhaps he is to be interpreted as a sailor). Infant mortality rates were high, with estimates ranging from twenty to fifty percent. The mother feels empathy for the mer-mother, and treats the dead child as one of her own.

So while the illustration hints at the plight of children in Victorian London, the poem goes one step further and dives into the terror and grief of motherhood in a world with very few resources for women. Both Tennant, the artist, and Fane, the poet, are writing from worlds of privilege, but they seem to be attempting to use that privilege to create change.

As mermaid poems go, this one has all of the common tropes of today’s contemporary speculative poetry. It hints at a haunting underworld realm, but also strikes at the trope that merpeople can’t survive above water. Mermaids are a common metaphor for the “other” in today’s contemporary speculative poetry.

For me, Fane’s “The Mer-Baby” is a particularly important piece of speculative poetry history. It establishes that women were writing about political topics even before science fiction and fantasy became a genre (as we know it).

I’m reminded of the poem “The Little Mermaid” by Jasmine Mans, from the book Black Girl, Call Home, which uses the mermaid genre elements to explore race:

When they tell
the Black girl
she can't play mermaid,
ask them,
what their people know
about holding their breath
underwater.

Similarly, the book We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt explores the metaphors of the mermaid through the lens of transness (excerpt below).

Not only has speculative poetry always been a part of the landscape, but it has also always pushed boundaries. It has always been “queer”—complicated on more than one level. It has always been political.

If you want to learn more about the Speculative Poetry Initiative, visit our website:

www.poetryhugo.com

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Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early! Writing Poetry from the Shadows DATE: 4 Weeks Starting October 6th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via The Poetry Barn Since Edgar Allen Poe wrote “Nevermore!” Poetry has played with the elements of horror. Horror poetry is a recognized form, and each year, the Horror Writer’s Association awards the Bram Stoker Award for best dark poetry book. From monsters to ghosts to fairy tales, darkness can be a powerful metaphor to explore trauma, gender, sexuality, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the shadows and write dark, personal poems using speculative tropes. Tickets on sale soon, check back!

So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers. Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

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Hi! I'm Holly, a freelance editor living in Houston, Texas. I've been an editor working with authors from all walks of life for about ten years now. My clients vary from poets to nonfiction authors with big ideas to artists to indie writers in the speculative genres. My favorite clients to work with are new writers looking to make the leap into publishing. I am the managing editor for Interstellar Flight Press, an indie speculative publishing house focusing on novellas, short story collections, anthologies, and poetry collections.

About ten years ago, I moved from Maine back home to Texas with my spouse. We were just finishing graduate school, and he was starting a new job in healthcare. Having put him through school, I knew I wanted to do something with writing and publishing, but I wasn’t sure what. I’d done some editing for grad students, and I thought maybe that could be a viable path.

I found my first client via a part-time job I applied for post grad school. The job didn’t want me, but one of the reviewers recommended me to a friend who was looking for a writing assistant. From there, I started picking up freelance jobs both as a writer and editor, and slowly started growing my freelance business.

In 2020, my editing business had grown so much that I had to hire outside help. I made the decision to take a part-time job at an academic journal for those coveted benefits, and now I edit mostly part-time. But in 2025, I’ve had at least two editing clients every month of the year. Most of the time, I’m turning writers away because my schedule is full.

I don’t think I anticipated how busy and how popular my services would be. Getting started as a freelance editor is a leap of faith. You’re asking writers to trust you—and the key to that, in my opinion, is you have to be trustworthy. So I’m going to share with you some of the main ways I got my business off the ground so many years ago: By building trust with writers. Writers trust me because they know I frigging love writing.

This all goes back to my writing motto: “Love what you write, write what you love.” As a freelance editor, you could say my motto is: “Love what you edit, edit what you love.”

This is the topic of my upcoming September workshop, all about how to get started as a book editor:

So You Want to Be a Book Editor
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops
Price: $299
​
Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

So how do you get started as a book editor?

1. Love what you do

There are some simple pieces of advice I’m going to skip over because they’re pretty obvious. The first is that you should probably already be a writer and a reader. Honing your skills at both of these things is a major key to becoming a successful editor. Because the editor’s job, most days, is either rewriting (in the loosest sense of the term) or reading.

I joke that most days, I don’t have time to read for fun because my days are taken up by reading for work. It goes without saying that if you want to be an editor, you probably love books and reading. But it’s one thing to love something and another to make it your job. So you really, really need to love this.

It’s a good idea to evaluate WHAT you love about the idea of being an editor. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovering an amazing new idea. That means you might be better suited to work at a publishing house. Freelance editors don’t care about ideas—we can evaluate whether a book idea is viable given the current market, but we can’t tell a writer if an idea will succeed, only how well-executed it is.

Maybe you want to do this because you love language and the nitpicky details of grammar. Now THAT’S a reason to become a book editor 🙂 

Determining what you love about books, reading, and writing is an important first step because it helps you figure out where your focus should be as an editor.

For me, my focus has always been working with new writers. I love messy writing. I love seeing a draft go from blah to yeah! and helping writers level up their craft. Being the person a new writer can trust is my joy—I love seeing my writers grow and improve.

2. Determine Your Skillset

Once you know what you love (why you want to do this), it’s useful to consider focusing your business around that point of interest. There are tons of authors out there who need help with their books, but they want an editor who is a good fit for what they are writing or what they need help with. So by marketing yourself based on your focus, you can target those writers who might be a good fit for your services.

Types of Editing

There are several types of editing services I offer. The reason editing is often split into these types is that writers usually approach their manuscript in steps. Very few writers successfully revise everything all at once. Some editors choose one of these to focus on:

Developmental Editing

Also called content editing, a dev edit looks at the big-picture items in a book. I generally look at the four elements of fiction: Character/Point of View, Conflict/Stakes, Setting/ Worldbuilding, and Events/Situation/Plot.

If you are good at synthesizing big issues in a way that’s easy to understand, you might want to focus on developmental editing.

Copyediting

Also called line editing, a copyedit focuses on the line-level prose of a manuscript. A copy editor often “rewrites” a book by suggesting changes in sentence structure, paragraph structure, voice, tone, and anything related to how the prose sounds when read out loud. Most authors who are seeking a copyedit do so because they might be great at plot or characters but need some help smoothing the sentence-level writing. A book that’s being copyedited often has already been through a developmental edit.

I personally don’t do a ton of copyediting, although as a poet, I love doing it. The main reason is that copyediting is my most expensive type of editing I offer. It takes me a long time, and it essentially involves combing through the manuscript word by word, so I have to charge a lot for it.

If you love language and words, copyediting is a great choice to focus on as an editor.

Proofreading

Proofreading is often the most technical types of editing out there. It’s not just about spelling and grammar—it’s about making sure the spelling and grammar in a mansuscript aligns with specific style guides used by publishers! For example, in the United States, book publishers generally use Chicago Manual of Style. But journalists use AP style, and medical fields sometimes use MLA or AMA.

Your skillset might fit into one of these types of editing. Maybe you decide to focus just on Developmental Editing, or else proofreading. This can be helpful because it can help guide your growth as an editor. If you want to be a proofreader and potentially work with larger publishers, you may want to look into taking some editing classes because proofreading can get highly technical. But of course, it depends on what genre you want to edit. While I do all of these types of editing, I generally only do them in specific genres.

Genre

Every writer has had the experience of having a critique group not understand your story because it’s a genre the group isn’t familiar with. The same goes for editors. One example is the romance genre—it is full of specific tropes that are important to understand as an editor.

Because I write speculative fiction, my main editing focus is on science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Within that genre, I pretty much edit anything from short stories to poetry to anthologies and novels. Although most of my clients are independent self-publishers, I have also worked with agents and editors from top publishing houses. In these genres, I have to understand the expectations of a reader. A reader of say, science fiction, won’t be confused by sci-fi jargon about blasters and spaceships, so I don’t need to suggest that a writer clarify those terms.

My main love is poetry. I work with poets to develop manuscripts for submission to awards and self-publication. My expertise includes ordering/sequencing, line editing, thematic development, and helping poets build emotional narratives. I would call poetry the most niche of all editing—you really have to know the structures and schemes that go into certain poetic forms.

Another niche I love is nonfiction or “big idea” books, as I call them. My favorite nonfiction books to work with are big idea books that explore the wide range of history, art, religion, and culture. I am a coordinator for the Religious Studies Review, hosted by Rice University.

To get started as an editor, pick a few genres that you love, and build your expertise in those.

Editing Style

Another way to focus your skillset is in your editing style. What kind of feedback do you give? If you’re more analytical and critical, you might do well in copyediting or proofreading. If you’re someone who is good at being a cheerleader for writers, you might want to focus on developing a consultation service that allows you to work with writers one-on-one. There are even editors who solely focus on what is called “writing therapy,” i.e., helping writers through traumatic experiences via writing.

I have a keen memory of one of my first editing consultations. The writer wanted someone to “eviscerate” his manuscript and tear it apart. I told him that I wasn’t the right fit: My goal is to lift writers up and make them feel empowered to improve and grow. It’s totally fine to want someone who has a more critical eye—but that’s just not how I operate 🙂. Sure, I gave up a potential client. But that client wouldn’t have been happy with my style, so it was fine to let it go.

I always say that my goal in approaching a manuscript edit is to help the author do their own revisions. I’m providing feedback on my reactions as a reader, but I rarely offer more subjective suggestions. I might say, “Your characters feel a little surface-level. One way to improve this might be to give us more interior moments with them.” This frames the feedback in a more positive way, making suggestions feel like that: Suggestions and not fixes.

I find prescriptive feedback rarely works because writers often have their own vision for a work. I try to help the writer find that vision. For great writing to happen, something has to break open in the writer and surprise them. It's that surprise that will catch a reader, too.

Publishing

Some editors focus less on manuscript editing and more on business advice, like helping new writers get published. If your goal is to become an editor at, say, a big top-four publisher, then you’ve chosen a really specific path. Most of those editors live in New York. There might be a location move in your future.

Because I don’t live in NYC, most of my clients are self-published. This means I learn a lot from them about the constantly changing self-publishing landscape. I have to stay up to date on trends and what’s popular, while also being flexible enough to move with my writer’s punches as they shift through a changing world of publishing.

One thing I love doing is working with self-published authors on series for rapid publication at places like Amazon. This has been really successful with many of my authors, and I love the process of working through a series-level plotline.

3. Build Your Skillset

All of the above focuses are useful to figure out before you get into any kind of learning mode as an editor. Once you know what you love and what you want to edit, then you can start building your skills.

Classes for Editors

There are tons of great resources for editors wanting to learn specific types of editing. I recommend checking out the Editorial Freelancers Association classes. There are also several colleges that offer classes for editors. These are more often geared toward copyediting/proofreading, and in my experience, they may not teach developmental editing as often.

Read in Your Genre

Once you’ve picked your genre niche, read widely in that genre. It’s not just that you should be reading books (NEW books published recently), but read what is popular. Read what is unpopular. Then learn the difference between the two. Take notes on the favorite authors you love: What makes their books so good? Pay attention to trends and spend time at bookstores and with writers, figuring out what is new in those genres.

Get On-the-Ground Practice

Writers love free feedback, so it won’t be hard to find folks to practice on! Start by giving critiques in your genre and type of editing. Build your own editing style. Come up with a routine or method that works for you because later you can market that method to writers.

Meet and Talk to Writers

Go to writers’ conferences. Go to writing classes. Meet other writers and make friends. Don’t lead with “I’m an editor”; instead, just be friendly and approachable. The best editors are also writers!These are just a few tips I have for those who want to start editing but don’t know where to begin. If you like this post, let me know what other questions you have about editing! I’d love to answer them here on my blog.

Got a writing question? Send me an email and I’ll answer it on my blog.

Love what I do? Upgrade to leave me a tip for just $25/year.

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early! Writing Poetry from the Shadows DATE: 4 Weeks Starting October 6th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via The Poetry Barn Since Edgar Allen Poe wrote “Nevermore!” Poetry has played with the elements of horror. Horror poetry is a recognized form, and each year, the Horror Writer’s Association awards the Bram Stoker Award for best dark poetry book. From monsters to ghosts to fairy tales, darkness can be a powerful metaphor to explore trauma, gender, sexuality, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the shadows and write dark, personal poems using speculative tropes. Tickets on sale soon, check back!

So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers. Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

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Overwhelmed by biased news? Cut through the clutter and get straight facts with your daily 1440 digest. From politics to sports, join millions who start their day informed.

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Ahh, Summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

Dearest carnival folk,

Summer is not my favorite season, as you’ve probably heard me moan about on this newsletter in the past. I’m a fall girlie 100 percent. The summer, especially here in Houston, is one big, sweaty slog for me.

Did you know you can change how you feel about something, and you don’t have to answer to anyone about it? You don’t have to keep putting up with that so-called friend who wounds you with every little cutting remark because they’ve put you in a box. You don’t have to keep destructive behaviors that hurt those around you, just because you think that’s “Who You Are”. You don’t have to be afraid to follow an idea because it doesn’t fit your genre or your style. You can be anything you want, and your writing can be, too.

So this summer, I’m trying to put aside my dread and instead focus on what makes me happy, finding joy in writing, and embracing the parts of myself I struggle with. Here’s to a season of sun, surprise, and a little more self-forgiveness than summers past.

A few things I’m excited about: I’m currently a teaching artist at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH)! I can’t wait to get to host workshops out of the museum. More to come soon! I’m also heavily involved with a project near and dear to my heart: Getting a speculative poetry Hugo Award. Read more on that here.

Write what you love, love what you write.

☀️🧢🌄🌅☀️🌡️🌊🥥🐚☀️🏊👡😎🌻🏝️🕶️👕🌴☀️👙🌞🍹🏄☀️🥵🩱🩴🩳🍦🍨☀️

As a reminder, If you love what I do and want to support me, you can now upgrade to this newsletter to get extra-weird perks:

• At least one subscriber-only post per month

• Support me, your corporeal host, for less than a cup of coffee

• Bragging rights on being an absolute angel sent from heaven who loves freelancers and supports indie writers

• A 20% discount on any of my editing services

My next workshop is: National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days 

I have a new poem in Reckoning: “Climate Change Is a Poem”

The Personal Impacts of Climate Change: A Poem About Intimacy

Poet Holly Lyn Walrath reads an unedited draft of the poem "Climate Change Is a Poem" and discusses the importance of pairing ecopoetry with personal identity.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/climate-change

The Speculative Poetry Initiative

The Speculative Poetry Initiative is a group of poets and writers interested in creating a Hugo Award for Speculative Poetry.

poetryhugo.com

Probably from PANK 💀

Every Weird Circular, I list upcoming opportunities to publish your writing geared toward writers of the weird (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative!) I prioritize PAID opportunities by markets I trust and try to vet as much as I can.

Upcoming Submission Windows:

• Baffling Magazine (Neon Hemlock), deadline June 15th. Themed (Mecha vs. Kaiju) and unthemed flash fiction speculative genres, with a queer bent (up to 1.2k words). Pays $.08/word

• Haven Spec, deadline June 30: General submission window. Fiction (up to 6k words, up to 5 poems). Pays $.08/word for stories and $20 for poems.

• manywor(l)ds, deadline July 30: Open to trans, two-spirit, disabled, neurodivergent, Mad, queer, crip, nonbinary, genderqueer, intersex writers. All genres up to 1k words or five pages. Pays $10.

• Plott Hound Magazine, deadline June 15th: Speculative stories, essays, and poems with animal protagonists (up to 5k words or 3 poems, 5 pages). Pays $.08/word or 50 for poems.

• Nonbinary Review, deadline July 31st: Solarpunk Art, Prose, Poetry (up to 3k words or 3 poems). Pays $.01 per word or $10 for poetry)

Need more submission ideas? Check the Grinder's newest markets, Duotrope's calendar, Submittable’s Discover Feature, Heavy Feather Review’s Where to Submit, SFPA's Speculative Poetry Markets, Horror Tree, Moksha's Open Publications, or The International Writer’s Collective Blog.

Inspired

Helping you stay connected with your intentions and activate them in 1 minute per day!

1minquestion.beehiiv.com/subscribe?_bhba=a30da6a9-63b6-4288-9d95-7565bbf76dc9

Prompt #1: Your Iconic Space

In the book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders refers to the author’s voice/style as their “Iconic space”:

“the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal.”

Write a story, poem, or essay from your iconic space.

Bonus Round: What Defines You?

If you’re not sure what your space is, write down a list of things that define you as a writer, or try a word map of words that interest/inspire you. Then pick three things from that list and try to triangulate them into a story.

Prompt #2: Journaling About Your Writing Life

In the book Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity, Maria Bowler speaks on how creativity is bound to human experience:

“Being in your life as a creative process will not free you from the challenges of the human experience—What life would that be?—but it will connect you to reality as it lives and breathes in you. This aliveness is not a reward for your production, it is simply the truth of who you are.”

Spend some time journaling about your writing life: Do you find yourself separating the creative from the “living”? How can you cultivate more “aliveness” in your work and in your self?

Bonus Round: Fill Your Creative Well

Spend some time this week doing something you love but haven’t had time to do in a while. It might be writing—but it might be something that enriches and inspires the act of writing. Let that thing fill you up, then be prepared for the creative boost that comes with feeling more relaxed in your life.

Prompt #3: A Million Words and the Craft of Writing

In the book Break, Blow, Burn and Make, E. Lily Yu talks about the importance of learning craft:

“It is easy enough to name these elements of craft. It is hard to learn them, harder to apply them well, and hardest to practice them so thoroughly and for so long that language and technique become absorbed by the intuition, integrated into the artist’s being, and thereafter remain invisible and unconscious, but ready to hand. This absorption requires a period of dedication to learning and practicing the craft, not to be confused with a formal degree program, and much solitary study, trial, and failure. To give a sense of the duration of the apprenticeship, several writers have suggested that the beginner does not produce competent work before writing and discarding a million words.”

If you’re struggling to write, a million words might feel like a massive challenge. But let’s break that down. If you spend ten years writing, that’s 100,000 words in a year. That’s 8,333 words in a month, which is two thousand words in a week, or just about 300 words a day.

Make a goal this week to write at least 300 words on any topic. Try this for a week and see how it feels. If it seems hard, you can adjust your words down. If it’s easy, you may need to level up and increase your word goals. If you hate word count goals, instead consider making a less rigid goal. What is one thing you want to get done in the rest of this year? Make a list of your own steps to that goal.

Bonus Round: Learn the Craft

Instead of focusing on word count, try focusing on craft. For the next month, focus on learning how to write one element of fiction or poetry or whatever your genre might be. Let’s say it’s fiction. Focus on dialogue for a month. Write only in dialogue. Read books about how to write good dialogue. Find writers you like who write good dialogue. Listen to movies for dialogue. Read scripts.

By the end of the month, you might not have 8,333 words, but you will probably have learned a lot.

Earth Conscious Life

Receive FREE solutions-oriented news, actionable tips, and resources dedicated to holistic health & environmental restoration.

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What I’m Consuming This Month (Literally, it’s in my brain-belly)

📖 Weird Book of the Month: This Dog Will Change Your Life by Elias Weiss Friedman

If you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably heard of The Dogist: A photographer who takes snapshots of dogs on the streets of New York. While I wish The Dogist would feature more shelter and rescue dogs, I love a good dog story.

🧵 Craft Article of the Month: “What My Father’s Emails Taught Me About the Craft of Writing” via LitHub

As someone with a lost dad, I loved this story of a writer rediscovering their voice through their father’s voice

“How does someone learn to be a writer? The most common and accepted answer is to become a reader. When we consume writing we love, we internalize the language, structure, and cadence; like living abroad in foreign-speaking country, phrases can’t help but rub off. This can be most affecting when we’re young and impressionable. Most writers I know spent their formative years steeped in books, learning their taste, studying the classics, and forming a sensibility, while my brain was firing on digital logic, object-oriented code, and fourier transforms. Whatever early reading was needed to make someone a “writer,” I assumed, had surely passed me by…”

🎵 Music to Write by: Bruit ≤ The Age of Ephemerality

If you love movie music, ambient sounds, and bizarre instrumentals, you will love Bruit. Like a Lynchian fever dream, this album surprises in the best ways—it might as well be the next soundtrack for the next Christopher Nolan film.

This newsletter is entirely run by me, Holly, your corporeal host. I’m just a bundle of anxiety shoved into a sweater and glasses, fueled by caffeine-free-zero-sugar Coke and feminine rage. I really, really love having you around, though. So if you want to keep reading, please consider becoming a subscriber: (please don’t make me join Substack.)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early!

So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

Wow, you made it all the way down here. Here’s a Ryan Gosling Gif for your troubles.

“Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet. … [it] is now a pressing political question, a question of survival.” (Jay Parini, Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry)

I’m going to do something a bit unorthodox in this post. I’m going to share with you the unedited (pre-publication) draft of a poem that I just had published. I’m also going to read that original version for you in audio.

My poem “Climate Change Is a Poem” appears in the latest issue of Reckoning Magazine, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. You can read the final published version there.

Read my poem “Climate Change Is a Poem” at Reckoning Magazine

I teach a class on nature poetry, and in that class, I often encourage students to direct their work not just to the larger problems associated with climate change, but also how climate change impacts people on a personal level. The goal is to get students to write from a more authentic place: One which acknowledges the human loss associated with climate change and how important identity is to our experience of this fading world.

I love the work of, say, Mary Oliver, who is often quoted at funerals and seen as an epoch of nature poetry. But a limitation of her work that is often seen as a success is that it’s often treated as universal. Oliver has shaved off the serial numbers of her poems, reducing them to the bare facts so that more people can access them. And while I adore Oliver’s work, it is limited in that it doesn’t acknowledge the very stark divide of who is impacted by climate change and who can afford to write a poem in praise of nature without that acknowledgment.

The majority of popular nature poets are writing about climate change from a place of witness. And while this is necessary, we also need poems that acknowledge the disparity of climate change.

“We cannot save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people—especially those most often unheard.” —Leah Thomas, The Intersectional Environmentalist

Again and again, I’ve noticed we (the poets, the publishers) have a tendency to write about nature from a reverent, worshipful place. We want to celebrate the beauty. After all, poems should be beautiful. And yet, to me, weirdness is also beautiful. We rarely, as Gerald Manley Hopkins does, make praise for that which is “counter, original, spare, strange.”

Lately, my nature poetry has been heavily focused on the intersection of gender, queerness, and chronic illness—and how those identities shape my experience of climate change. I find myself writing about how I feel unsafe walking in the woods alone as a woman, how having a sometimes-broken body changes my experience of nature, how to me, nature is inherently queer.

“Climate Change Is a Poem” is quite long because it is an attempt to reconcile all of the smaller, more intimate moments where climate change impacts our lives. When I started writing it, I was originally inspired by the work of Eli Clare in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (edited by TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson). In that anthology, Clare pairs the realities of climate change with questions of gender, and often repeats certain lines for impact.

A beautiful example of a poem that pairs identity and nature is Lucille Clifton’s “the earth is a living thing”, available to read at Poets.Org. Here, Clifton expertly aligns the many black things in nature to the experience of being black in the world. This poem’s echo of “is a…” was an inspiration for me.

the earth is a living thing

is a black shambling bear

poets.org/poem/earth-living-thing

Climate Change is inherently political, but it’s less often talked about as a problem tied to identity. You might be wondering why personal identity matters when it comes to climate change. Unfortunately, this means you may not be paying as much attention as you think you are.

Research has found that climate change impacts marginalized identities at a much higher rate. Research has found that extreme temperatures impact more vulnerable groups like low-income households, communities of color, the unhoused, and immigrants (EPA). Studies have shown LGBTQ+ people often face higher rates of chronic illness as a result of being more exposed to environmental hazards (The Center for American Progress). By 2050, “climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty” (UN Women).

I’ve written before about how women often shoulder the burden of collective change (“Husbands Are the Problem with Zero Waste”), how we should encourage people to write about the green spaces in their city because many don’t have access to nature (“Writing Poetry About Nature in Your Backyard”), and how nature poetry should reflect the diversity of the world (“Nature Is Diverse, so Poetry Should Be Too”).

We rarely see poetry written from the perspective of marginalized voices about climate change. What is far more likely to be uplifted is the “pretty” climate change poem: The poem that celebrates neatness, cleanness, and attempts to be apolitical.

I was struck by how Archana Soreng, a member of the UN’s youth group on climate change, put it: “Indigenous people, local communities, young people, women and girls, should be leaders of climate action and not victims of climate policies."

I think one way to lead is by writing poetry. The poet is an observer and a witness, but also, poet identity is more important than ever. Poetry gives the victim a voice.

When this poem was accepted by Reckoning, it went through the normal editorial process, and I’m happy with the version that was published. My reasoning for sharing the original draft for this poem is not that I feel any sort of anger or frustration for how the published poem came out. I hope seeing the original draft can give you an idea of how poems can shift as they are published. For me, this version is more true—but perhaps harder to stomach.

Climate Change Is a Poem

Climate Change Is a Poem

After Eli Clare

The night we pushed the old
blue Mazda through cold
flood waters and bruises
bloomed like bayou algae
on my shoulder, neck, arms
where the weight of the dead car fell
after we trudged through
the water, snakes, and ants
to the hotel where I cried
terrified not for us but the
dogs we left behind—
 is a poem.

The detritus on the side of the road—
Styrofoam, glass bottle neck,
couch frame a momma cat had
kittens on, pieces of plastic
too small to count, crack pipe
busted, plastic bag clinging
to a barbed wire fence, newspaper
half-buried in the mud, in the red-dust
wind by a gas station out West, litter
like a sea on the side of IH-45—
 is a poem.

Microplastic invisible to the human eye
slipping into the water system
through the very clothing we wear
(can’t afford 100 percent cotton
and it has a plastic tag, anyway)
drawn into the ocean minutiae
from careless children
dropping Sprite bottles
(they were once glass)
into Galveston Bay
disappearing into waves,
a plastic bead spill
(the ship lost its way)
an airplane falling
from the sky
a satellite falling
out of orbit
a contract
falling through
everything degrading
just in increments
so small
you can’t see them
 is a poem.

The old woman on her porch
who lived 70 years and
the river never came up
to her feet before,
the police never came
to her door before
refusing to leave this place
she bought with her
hard-earned cash from
working so many years
at the wag-a-bag on the corner,
who can feel every inch
of it slipping away
beneath her tired feet
silt-slick boards
under her toes,
no, sir, if you want
me to go, you’re gonna have
to carry me out—
 is a poem. 

The organizers who switch
from LGBTQ to reproductive rights
to black lives matter without blinking,
a generation who taught
us not just to be loud
but to get shit done,
the ones whose ghosts
we carry on our backs
like fresh water—clean water—
shouldn’t we all be water
protectors? shouldn’t there be
water like justice?
queers who never wanted
justice, an eye for an eye,
justice is blind
who only wanted this win,
then this win, then this win
 is a poem. 

Bar soap in the shower
on a silicone mat
(is silicone better than plastic?
We may never know)
in my gym bag
(in the plastic case)
next to the kitchen sink
(with the wood-bristle brush)
in a million hotel bathrooms
un-reusable, unsalvageable
(Covid cut down on commutes
but tripled single-use)
the one black curly hair
stuck in the white soap—
 is a poem.

That which makes you uncomfortable
the sin and sex and dirty children
ode to Crocs, ode to compost crawling
with worms that grow up to be
soldier flies
(who is the soldier
and where is the war?)
the truth that it takes
all of us, working
in our own little spheres
as Dickens might have said
it takes protest
it takes choosing what to buy
it takes refusing, reusing,
it takes discomfort
settled into the hot of your belly
seeping through your skin
to make change
 is a poem. 

My spouse asleep next to me
under the revolving fan
the AC blowing sweet and cold
everything at peace and
safe—homage to plain-spoken,
never broken, we will survive
together love even if
tomorrow the sun is gone
even if they say
this poem is not enough
this body is not enough
this love is not enough
 is a poem.

Got a writing question? Send me an email and I’ll answer it on my blog.

Love what I do? Upgrade to leave me a tip for just $25/year.

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early! Writing Poetry from the Shadows DATE: 4 Weeks Starting October 6th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via The Poetry Barn Since Edgar Allen Poe wrote “Nevermore!” Poetry has played with the elements of horror. Horror poetry is a recognized form, and each year, the Horror Writer’s Association awards the Bram Stoker Award for best dark poetry book. From monsters to ghosts to fairy tales, darkness can be a powerful metaphor to explore trauma, gender, sexuality, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the shadows and write dark, personal poems using speculative tropes. Tickets on sale soon, check back!

Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers. Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

Welcome back to my series on practical ways to finish your book using the power of psychology. Each one of this ten-part series presents a different method you can try to finally just GET IT DONE and WRITE THE FRIGGIN BOOK. If you haven’t read the other articles in this series, you can check them out below:

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part One

Sprint to the Finish Line: JUST DO IT. How to take a book from draft to ready to publish, with prompts for your writing journal

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/justdoit

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Two

Sprint to the Finish Line: Make a Well-Organized Plan and Execute It Using If-Then Planning

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/if-then-planning

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Three

Discover clever tips to boost your creativity with writing prompts and expert advice for writers to enhance your creative writing productivity.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/trick-yourself

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Four

How to gamify your creative process to finish a writing project. A series of articles for writers who need help finishing a book. Learn how to make writing fun again.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/gamify

Manifest Your Goals through the Power of Your Imagination

One of the writer’s most powerful tools is the imagination. Writers are people who can take something that’s just in their mind and translate it to the page and into a compelling story. We think about using the imagination to create—but rarely as part of the book planning process. Outlining, research, and even marketing are often thought of as part of the “logic” brain. But you can also harness your imagination to meet your writing goals.

When I started running, I struggled because I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS). This means that my joints and body struggle to find their place in space. I often don’t have good sensory input on where my legs are while running. It’s hard to describe, but essentially, I’m at a higher risk of injury because my joints are so lax.

To combat this, I started doing mental exercises to “practice” my run. I would watch videos of runners and imagine the right heel placement and standing up straight. While running, I would visualize my goal and imagine my body succeeding. I was surprised by how much this helped my run.

Research shows that creating a “mental stimulation” or imagining yourself doing something you want to achieve has the same impact as actually practicing that thing. So for example, if you want to run a 10k, you should spend time imagining how you are going to achieve that goal. There are two types of mental stimulation. The first is called “goal rehearsal”, which is the act of imagining yourself achieving a goal. The second is called “process stimulation”, which is the act of imagining yourself completing the steps to a goal. So I might imagine myself running first two miles, then three, then seven miles at one go, and so on.

Manifestation is “the ability to cosmically attract success in life through positive self-talk, visualization, and symbolic actions (e.g., acting as if something is true)” (Dixon et al., 2023, para 1). While I don’t necessarily believe that visualizing a goal is “magic,” I do think it works because you’re priming your brain to be prepared to succeed.

Let’s apply it to writing. The goal is to finish your project. What “finished” looks like may vary for you. Let’s say finished means a draft you can send out to agents or publishers. Now think through the process of getting to that goal. You’ll probably want to revisit the first blog post in this series, where I outline the steps to getting a book published.

The same research says that mental stimulation works for three reasons. One, it basically forces you to come up with a plan. You can only fantasize about reaching a goal for so long before your brain starts thinking of ways to achieve that goal. Secondly, manifesting can help you feel better about yourself. Think about it: Your brain is seeing and imagining you succeed. Enough of that positive thinking, and you’ll eventually believe yourself. Third, manifesting can actually help improve motivation. By imagining yourself taking the steps to finish your goal, you will actually feel more motivated.

Manifesting is something I use in writing every day. When I’m working on a fiction project, I’ve found it really helps me to imagine myself as my character. I put myself in the scene and walk through the events of that scene. This exercise has helped me massively when it comes to figuring out what comes next in a plot. One reason is that I’m a discovery writer (lovingly referred to as a pantser). I need the boost of mystery to fuel my writing process and imagination. This also helps me when I don’t know what happens next. I let my brain churn on it, imagining the plot of the book over and over again until I figure out the next event or character action.

Try this journal exercise: Spend some time manifesting your goal. Write your goal down on a sticky note and put it somewhere you see it every day. Now write 10 steps toward that goal. Imagine yourself going through those steps. How can you create a plan to achieve those steps?

Got a writing question? Send me an email and I’ll answer it on my blog.

Love what I do? Upgrade to leave me a tip for just $25/year.

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early! Writing Poetry from the Shadows DATE: 4 Weeks Starting October 6th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via The Poetry Barn Since Edgar Allen Poe wrote “Nevermore!” Poetry has played with the elements of horror. Horror poetry is a recognized form, and each year, the Horror Writer’s Association awards the Bram Stoker Award for best dark poetry book. From monsters to ghosts to fairy tales, darkness can be a powerful metaphor to explore trauma, gender, sexuality, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the shadows and write dark, personal poems using speculative tropes. Tickets on sale soon, check back!

Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers. Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

In writing, we talk a lot about the character’s motivation. A character is motivated by their past and what they want. Contemporary books hinge on character voice and point of view. Today’s reader wants an authentic, rich, unique, and active character to draw them through the storyline. Character drives plot—the choices characters make should shift the narrative.

You might have the quirkiest character with the most involved backstory—but if a reader doesn’t care about them, none of it matters. So, how do you make a reader fall in love (or utterly despise) a character?

The secret is in figuring out the character’s “why”. This, and many other topics, are the subject of my upcoming workshop on writing the speculative novel.

Writing the Speculative Novel
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops
​Price: $299
Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions.
Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published!

Here’s a scenario I encounter often in teaching writing: A writer submits their first chapter for critique, and everyone agrees that the story is interesting, but it’s missing something. “I loved the writing and how beautifully everything is described. But I was confused. I couldn’t figure out why the character [did x].”

Let’s step back a bit: Where does all this obsession with character goals come from? Well, it comes from the reality that most contemporary readers are used to active characters. Active characters have agency—they make choices, for good or for worse, and those changes impact the story. Not all genres need an active character. For example, children’s and young adult books often have less active characters. Things happen to these characters that are outside of their control. And that makes sense because they aren’t adults—they don’t have as much agency over what happens in their lives. Kids don’t make their own bedtimes or choose to go to school or not.

When we use the terms “active” and “passive” to describe characters, we are referring to the character’s agency. Most writing advice says to avoid having passive characters. Active characters tend to have more internal conflict. They sort through what they want to do about something and then enact their plans toward a goal. This gives them more “agency” and hooks the reader faster.

Passive characters don’t act, they react. Because they can get stuck in loops, they feel less interesting to readers.

This is another argument for picking a strange character. Unique points of view are more active in nature. That being said, passive characters can still be fascinating if written well.

Active Characters:

• Choose to create change

• Move the story forward

• Are believed to have more “agency”

• Have internal motivators

• Let the reader project “what they would do in the situation” onto the plot

• Can feel flat if they are constantly moving forward and never reflecting

Passive Characters:

• Are not great at decision making

• Have external events impacting them

• May have less agency or more internal agency

• Have external motivators that “push” them into action

• Seen often in children’s literature

• Get stuck in loops

• May feel dissatisfying to the reader

In the past, books could get away with a slower pace and more passive characters, as well as more distant narrators. A good example is The Great Gatsby. Largely seen as one of literature’s most well-written books, this book often leaves modern readers confused, mostly because the book is written from a distant observer’s point of view in the character of Nick. Nick may be the book’s protagonist, but his story isn’t central. NIck gets thrown into the story by chance. By comparison, consider a book like The Hunger Games. The protagonist literally volunteers to put her life in danger and in the center of the book’s action.

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Modern books rely on very close points of view with a lot of what we call “interiority”. These are characters who think, feel, and speak on the page. The psychology of the character becomes the impetus for reading.

Think about why we read: It’s to learn about ourselves. The reader who encounters say, a hyperintelligent detective who’s trying to solve a mystery, will think: How would I solve this murder? A super-capable captain of a spaceship hurtling toward a black hole? How would I save the ship? and so on. As we read, we think through the problem the character is presented with. We might not make the same decision as the character, but that’s fine because the character isn’t meant to be universal. We can start to guess how the character will react, until we know and love even the most cantankerous character. (Looking at you, Sherlock.)

“If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it—by the non-reality—you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.” —Jodi Picoult

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Story is emotion. Story isn’t the same thing as plot. Plot is events: Things that the character does or that happen to them. But a character who only reacts can be boring because there’s no internal choice required. There’s no rock and a hard place.

Most writing advice books emphasize the importance of providing your character with a clear goal to pursue, yet they often fail to explain why this is essential to storytelling. The key to a compelling narrative lies not just in the goal itself, but in the character's motivation—what fuels their desire to reach that goal. This motivation adds depth to the character and creates an emotional connection with the audience. By understanding why a character is striving for their goal, readers are more likely to engage with their journey, experiencing the struggles and triumphs alongside them. Ultimately, motivation transforms a simple objective into a meaningful endeavor, making the character's pursuit resonate on a deeper level.

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” —Ray Bradbury

Every literary genre fundamentally hinges on understanding the “why” behind its narrative. In a memoir, for example, it becomes essential to go beyond merely recounting the sequence of events that the author experienced. Readers want to know the significance of these events from the narrator's perspective—what motivated their decisions, how these experiences shaped their identity, and why they resonate on a deeper emotional level. The “why” serves as the backbone of the personal story, encapsulating the internal struggles and conflicts that the author faced, adding layers of meaning and relatability to the story. This emotional connection not only engages the reader but also illuminates the universal themes present in personal storytelling.

The “why” also translates to the author. I often ask authors as I edit: Why did you make this choice? Why this character? Why right now? These questions can stump a writer but they’re meant to get the writer thinking about why they made the choices they did in their book. While you may not know why you chose a certain plot point, you can bet the reader will make up their own guess. Better yet, make a character with a changing why—one who starts out say, with a selfish motivation and slowly becomes interested in saving the world.

“If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.” —Flannery O’Connor

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I love the larger conversation in the writing community now about the writing advice “show, don’t tell”. A lot of times, I think the writer’s struggle with the why comes from this well-meaning advice. It says that you should show us, through the character’s actions, what they feel. But a little bit of telling can be really helpful when it comes to getting across the reasoning behind character motivation.

Most reader confusion comes from the assumption the writer makes that the reader can put together context clues. But if those clues aren’t on the page, the reader will never figure it out! Putting your character’s why on the page helps guide the reader.

Sometimes, the most compelling thing you can do on the first page of a book is give the reader a desire to find out the why of a character. If you can set up one burning question about the character, you’ll hook a reader for the whole book.

Let’s look at an example. Below is the first page of Martha Wells’ super-popular, soon-to-be-streaming TV Series, The Murderbot Diaries. The book’s title tells us a lot about the main character: A murder bot. But in the first paragraph, Wells twists our expectations about the character:

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, and hoping Dr. Volescu and Dr. Bharadwaj finished their survey soon so we could get back to the habitat and I could watch episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

I admit I was distracted. It was a boring contract so far and I was thinking about backburnering the status alert channel and trying to access music on the entertainment feed without HubSystem logging the extra activity. It was trickier to do it in the field than it was in the habitat.

Murderbot could have become a murder bot, but instead chooses to watch cozy streaming shows. This immediately makes us like Murderbot. Why doesn’t Murderbot want to kill? Well, all that killing would be a lot of work, and it would rather watch its favorite show. This makes the character deeply relatable. The why is why we like Murderbot. Plus, there’s no “showing” required. Murderbot tells us outright what their deal is, and yet, we want to keep reading.

Figuring Out Your Character’s WHY

Here’s a journaling prompt to get you thinking about your character’s why. Write a list of your character’s goals in your book. They might change, and there might be several. Next to each goal, write out why the character cares about that goal. Now, write a scene where the why is central. If you get stuck, simply tell the reader in the character’s voice why they want to achieve their goal.

For example: My character is a bot who has hacked their command module. Their goal is to find any way to keep watching their favorite streaming show. Why? Because although they are a robot, they are more human than the humans they encounter and don’t want to hurt anyone, thus shifting the most common robot trope.

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Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early! Writing Poetry from the Shadows DATE: 4 Weeks Starting October 6th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via The Poetry Barn Since Edgar Allen Poe wrote “Nevermore!” Poetry has played with the elements of horror. Horror poetry is a recognized form, and each year, the Horror Writer’s Association awards the Bram Stoker Award for best dark poetry book. From monsters to ghosts to fairy tales, darkness can be a powerful metaphor to explore trauma, gender, sexuality, and grief. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the shadows and write dark, personal poems using speculative tropes. Tickets on sale soon, check back!

Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers. Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting December 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous via The Poetry Barn Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

“Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” —Rita Dove, The Paris Review

“Western man has become a confessing animal.” —Michel Foucault

Is Confessional Poetry Bad?

I recently came across an age-old argument resurrected: Poets should not use the word “I”. This argument insists that poetry that draws on personal experience is in some way cheaper, easier, and more juvenile. As one poet on social media put it, “For beginning poets, everything is personal.”

I’ll admit: I’m biased. My books of poetry are deeply personal. Numinous Stones, my latest chapbook, was a spiral out of grief through verse. Every line I write is a reference to something I love or something that’s happened to me. Like most writers, I started out in high school writing bad teenage emo poetry, and I never thought that one day, I’d share those words with the world, nevertheless have people relate to my poetry and tell me that they love it.

My very first ever published poem was deeply personal. I wrote it about my troubled relationship with my brother. After “For Lonnie” was published, several people reached out to me to thank me because they also had fraught brother relationships or had lost a brother and were grieving. The personal has been the beating heart of my poetry since the beginning.

So, as someone who looks at everything as personal (In fact, this is the topic of my next poetry book. I am, after all, a cancer.), I’ve always found this anti-personal trend to be a personal attack. 🙂 

But really, it’s also oblivious to the current reality of popular contemporary poetry. The truth is, readers love a good confession. Who wouldn’t? If someone says to you, “let me tell you a secret”, all of a sudden, you’re listening. The person who is actively seeking out a book of poetry to read in today’s book climate is someone who wants to read a personal story. They want to FEEL—and poetry that is impersonal is often divorced from emotion.

This is the topic of my new poetry workshop taking place in April for National Poetry Month.

Confessional Poetry
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops
Price: $299
Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession. 

Confessional poetry is the foundational bedrock of today’s contemporary popular poetry.

As of today, the bestseller lists for poetry are peppered with the personal. In January 2025, the American Booksellers Association came out with its list of poetry bestsellers. On it were some of the heavy hitters of popular poetry: Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (10th Anniversary Collectors Edition), an anthology of poems inspired by music’s most confessional writer, Ty (Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift), A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush, which is literally about being too much (and the humor of the feminine experience), Amanda Lovelace’s 10th instapoetry collection, she followed the moon back to herself, Mosab Abu Toha’s poems about life in Gaza, and Water, Water by Billy Collins, about “the beauties and ironies of everyday experience.” Pretty much the only books on this list that aren’t “personal” or identity-focused are the books that are about nature by Mary Oliver and Ada Limón (You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World is actually about humanity’s relationship to the natural world.)

Today’s contemporary poetry is one of politics and the personal. While poetry as a field is still largely dominated by white cis-gendered straight men, it’s easy to argue that the works that gain the most traction among awards and readers today are far more diverse than in the 1960s when confessional poetry began. What started as a movement of the personal, the revelation of inner worlds, imperfection, and the gritty truths of the body, grew into an examination of personal identity.

What conservatives would angrily call “woke propaganda” pretty much fills the poetry world today. The 2024 National Book Award for Poetry, for example, contains books about the personal experience of current events, from the destruction of Palestine to blackness to the immigrant experience to Indigenous identity.

Today’s contemporary poem on the personal is, as Regan Good says, “a kind of poem that is self-mocking and dead serious, metaphysical and secular. These are not poems of “self-expression” or personal epiphanic resolution. Rather they articulate moments of primary existence: a graph of language, time, and identity such that the resulting artifact–the poem–is indivisible. The best confessional poetry uses detail from life to position the poem’s speaker in psychic moments from which truths—hilarious, grave, desperate, terrifying, fraudulent—are spoken” (“Essay on Confessional Poetry; My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did” in Fence)

Confessional poetry has two purposes: It allows us to share a secret with the reader and invite them into our world, but it also allows for a personal journey. It makes writing not about making money or conforming to some arbitrary idea of what art is, but about writing as catharsis.

“Only by ruthless scrutiny of personal weaknesses–and the relinquishing of one’s reason to associative thinking—are clear, moving, necessarily fleeting portraits of the self possible.” Regan Good (“Essay on Confessional Poetry; My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did” in Fence)

It strikes me as odd, to say the least, that there are poets and educators still counseling poets against using the “I” in poetry, given how wildly popular and successful personal and identity-based poetry is today.

“All writing is personal, as Yeats believed, insofar as it projects out of your own being, often out of the tragedy of your own life. But it is also impersonal too. Aphantasmagoria takes over. The self is an other. The writer is an explorer fording through unmapped terrain, through the deep rivers of language.” —Edward Hirsch, Chicago Review, 1995

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How Did We Get Here? The Women of Confessional Poetry

According to Christopher Grobe, American poetry turned confessional in April 1959. At this time, Anne Sexton was rising to fame, W.D. Snodgrass had published Heart’s Needle, about his divorce and estrangement from his daughter, and Robert Lowell published Life Studies, a memoir in verse about mental illness.

Confessional poetry represented a turn in how poets approached the poem. The “confession” aspect of the term suggests spirituality: The image of someone confessing their sins behind a curtain to a priest. Poetry before this period was often narrative—great epics telling of history or romantic love poems that could apply to anyone. The confessional poets changed the poetry world because they wrote about difficult, messy, and often uncomfortable topics.

I suspect the fact that many women poets are writing in the confessional mode is part of why it’s seen as so distasteful. If we look at the two major confessional poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both are considered poor representations of the perfect, prim, well-behaved woman. Both wrote about mental health in unflinching, gendered ways, which made society uncomfortable. Both made choices in life that society did not agree with.

As Diane Middlebrook puts it in the essay “What Was Confessional Poetry?”, this early confessional poetry “was thoroughly middle-class postwar art—produced by [a small number of] WASP writers.” But its impact was huge.

Women confessionalists also came to fame alongside another movement that has been discussed as adjacent to confessional poetry: the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Poets like Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde formed an alternative feminist poetry that pushed back against the expectations of black and, in Lorde’s case, queer women.

These poets made space for the radical femme and queer poets of the ‘80s and ‘90s. As Eileen Myles puts it, “I remember when I first came around the poetry project I was informed by some of the older poets that personal poems were over. I guess it depended on who was a person and whether they had been one yet. I was willing to suppress it for a while” (Poetry in the 80s). This time period saw the dawn of the activist poem, as Myles notes, “Poetry in the eighties could function as litanized activism, you could really stare at the streets in your work, perform them, the times with all their nooks and crannies and contradiction, broken mirrors were an invitation to poetic excess. All these lives living next to each other was also kind of like the web before anyone had it.”

The internet was the next boon for personal poetry. It removed the barriers to publishing so that anyone could put their poems online, and today, Instapoetry is just one iteration of that practice of skirting the poetry gatekeeper.

Today’s most popular poets are often women, and they write poetry for women. Yet even young women have ingested and regurgitated the idea that this is in some way bad because it is accessible. As one young woman writes in a college newspaper of Rupi Kaur, “Kaur’s work allows little room for analysis because of its reliance on aphorisms and other tricks that are meant to make poetry sound ‘deep’” (Rupi Kaur Is Killing Poetry, Washington Square News, NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper, 2019.) The aphorism, by the way, has a deep history in ancient poetry; the word goes back to the Greek gnomic poem, which was a way of putting sayings into poetry in order to remember them for oration.

What troubles me about the argument that personal poetry is in some way bad is that this argument is inherently harmful. It says: Writing about yourself is cringe. No one cares. No one wants to hear about your feelings. Your experience doesn’t matter, even if you haven’t seen it represented in poetry before.

It’s hard not to see this de-legitimization of the personal for what it often becomes: a de-legitimization of marginalized voices. These kinds of arguments rarely have substance behind them—instead, they rely on a belief that older is better, formal is better. Let’s be honest, it’s often also: Whiter is better. Cis is better. Straight is better.

It’s not that confessional poetry has no craft; it’s that we were never given the tools to analyze craft that isn’t rooted in authoritarianism.

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The Personal Is Where Connection Happens

As a freelance editor and poetry teacher, one goal I have in working with writers is to bring out the emotion in their work. Poetry can be for fun; it can be for experimentation; it can be simply pretty and celebrate the joy of words; but very memorable poetry always has a deep current of emotion. The reason we memorize, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, is that we love them, and they make us feel. We read to feel.

It’s easy to get caught up in the object of the poem and forget its role is to connect with the reader. Leonard Cohen said, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Similarly, Muriel Rukeyser said, “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.”

What makes up experience is emotion. We define who we are by the experiences we’ve had, and those are a set of memories tied together by certain emotions. The first time you fell in love. The first time you were hurt by someone. Your most successful career moment. The first poem you ever wrote. What comes first is emotion.

One argument is that confessional poetry “privileges the particular” and that good poetry should always be “universal.” But this forgets two important points:

1. Highly specific and detailed personal poetry can still speak to a reader and, in fact, may speak to them more.

There’s an exercise I do with my poetry class where I ask them to include the five senses in their poems. I ask them to describe a place that matters to them using these five senses. One poet described a very specific pattern of tile from their childhood bathroom. What surprised us all was that another poet in the class remembered the exact tile and found it relatable. For the rest of us, it was just one of those beautiful details that helps ground a poem.

2. Not every experience is universal.

We must take care when we say that poetry should be universal. The reality is that for most poets, the poetry celebrated by the Academy of the poetry canon was not universal. It represented a privileged, white, cis, het, straight, male experience. The point of personal poetry is to celebrate the non-universal because that which is universal can also be problematic.

It was this discussion of the universal vs. the specific in my poetry workshops that led me to create a confessional poetry workshop. I want to celebrate the form and everything it allows for. I’m thrilled that we are seeing a death of poetry defined as “good” because it is traditional. Instead, we can let people love what they love.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: A Writing Prompt about the Personal

Here’s a writing prompt to try out writing in the confessional mode. Write a poem about two juxtaposing life experiences. For example, you might choose a positive experience and a negative experience. Describe how you felt in those moments. How would you describe your emotions? What might be a fitting metaphor that could apply to both situations?

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Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.  National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early!

Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

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About twenty years ago, I took a college class on Victorian Literature with Jerome Bump at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was an English Major. It was one of my favorite classes, where most days found us hiking down to look at the dinosaur fossils in Shoal Creek or sketching Littlefield House, a little-known Victorian house on campus. For our final project, we had a choice of writing a paper or a more “experiential” assignment: I chose to create a Victorian Literature Bot.

I can’t recall for the life of me what technology we used, but essentially, I fed the bot excerpts from Victorian-era poems and the history of that time period, and if you asked the bot questions, it would answer them using my inputs. Chatbots were at the intersection of hybridity back then, and they relied on humans to input their answers. Mostly, I found them funny. I snuck little jokes into my chatbot and spent hours more than I should have on the project. What would have been a dry research paper full of quotes became a bot with a snarky Holly personality. At the time, I think I had a fairly optimistic outlook on technology—most of which my parents didn’t understand. Cyberpunk ruled in my world—so much so that I called my first blog “Sylphack”—a combo of the Sylph myth and “hack” for hackers.

We’ve come a long way from my little chatbot, who mostly quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins, to today’s so-called AI.

The current existential threat to creatives is Artificial Intelligence, also called Generative AI, or more accurately, Large Language Models. Some have argued these tools are beneficial to writers and artists because they remove access issues, while the majority of the writing and art community see them as being similar to NFTs: Deeply problematic and likely to fail. Reactions range from cringeworthy milquetoast to “delete all Google products, burn my computer to the ground, and go live in the woods.” (Honestly, I can’t blame those who want to do the last one; I think about the nuclear option daily.)

This post is going to be an attempt to synthesize my thoughts and feelings on the topic as they stand right now, knowing full well that the landscape may change drastically and rapidly. There are a couple of myths and misunderstandings about AI circulating in the creative community right now that I want to discuss. The reality is AI is a gray area, and how we treat it in the years to come will have massive impacts on the livelihood of creative people.

LLMs Are Not True Artificial Intelligence

What changed between twenty years ago and now? Why were chatbots acceptable to use when LLMs are not? Well, the main difference between the chatbots of yesteryear and today is data. The way ChatGPT and other LLMs work is by using a neural network to process data in a way that mimics how the human brain works. Also called “deep learning”, this technology is responsible for some of the most fascinating breakthroughs of the last decade. Neural networks allow computers to learn through data.

This technology got its start in visual learning and image recognition. For example, if you feed a computer a ton of pictures of cats and label them as such, in theory, the network would soon be able to identify the cats. It does this through “neurons” or nodes that process parts of the larger question. For example, each node might identify different parts of the cat like a tail, whiskers, paws, etc. Using mathematical equations and different weighted numbers, the nodes connect in a network. (The best simple video I’ve found on this is here on YouTube).

In this way, today’s LLMs are language processors. They have been fed a ton of publically available data, and they use that data to mimic language, predicting sentence structures. When you ask an AI to “write a short story”, it is using all the data available to put sentences together in a way that mimics a short story. Microsoft Data Scientist Andreas Stöffelbauer explains that AIs are trained to generate “‘human-like’ text, not true text. Nothing indicates truthfulness to LLMs” (Data Science at Microsoft). The LLM recreates the patterns of what it knows to be a short story and then humans training the LLM reinforce that learning. It’s a far cry from what we think of as Artificial Intelligence: A machine that can learn and think independently.

One argument I’ve seen made in the science fiction community is that AIs are science fiction, so we should embrace them. But I think this ignores the large issue: One, you can’t define the AIs that are actually LLMs as such today, and two, science fiction, for the most part, has set out to warn us about AI, not to embrace it. From IRobot to Ex Machina and beyond, most SF uses the slippery slope argument to explore AI to its extreme possible outcome: And it’s not often good because humans aren’t often good. Humans are often greedy and make mistakes. Science Fiction saw AI as just that: An artificial intelligence that can eventually gain sentience when taken to its logical outcome.

So the argument that because AI is a new technology, it is somehow good is fairly ungrounded in the history of Science Fiction. This is the downfall of most technology humans create: We often don’t think through its eventual ramifications, and science fiction exists to make those connections.

Another myth to bust is the question of whether LLMs are similar to other technology-aided tools like Grammarly or spell check. Early Microsoft Word spell-check essentially used an internal dictionary to check every word against the “correct” spelling. For this reason, it was often inaccurate, although it did have a function to allow users to update the dictionary as needed.

Grammarly may have an AI function included now, but that function was only recently added around 2017. Grammarly was first created in 2009 with the goal of helping students avoid plagiarizing (it started as a tool to detect plagiarized work). What seems to be the key to the success of Grammarly’s spell-check function is that it capitalized on its large pool of users, asking them to contribute to whether a spell-check was correct or not. So, even as early as its beginning, Grammarly was using user data to make a better product.

It’s impossible to tell how Grammarly has used data now (was it just feedback, or was it also the text users put into the program?) because, like most tech companies, they aren’t forthcoming in details, and while they may couch their use of that data as “user feedback,” we can likely assume, like most tech companies that they have been using that data from the beginning. However, Grammarly separates its AI content from its spell checker, so this may give some the idea that they are different.

Even the so-called “safe” spell checkers are built on user’s data and copyrighted material.

Data Used in LLMs Infringes on Copyright

I’ve written before about how art that challenges the status quo is often seen as “not art.” Modern art, from Andy Warhol to Roy Lichtenstein to Mark Rothko, challenged what we know art to be. Artists who remixed or collaged or somehow worked with found objects or in reference to other artists were often seen as thieves, and this idea continues in today’s conversation surrounding found poetry and erasure poetry.

So, how is AI any different? The LLMs and generative AI of today are trained on data input. Data is given to the machine, and it learns based on that data. But unlike my Victorian literature chatbot, the data used by big tech companies to train generative AI is not created by one human, nor does it have a bibliography of where the data came from.

You’ve probably noticed that in an internet-based world, every website you view has cookies that “track” your data. Every software you sign up for has a very long user agreement you sign that generally has guidelines for data use. But that wasn’t always the case. For a long time, people accepted their data would probably be stolen. But the fear of having say, your social security number stolen, was generally kind of nebulous because there was often no way for hackers to actually use or mine that data. It was just so big. And the majority of data hacks in the early 2000s didn’t result in direct impacts for most people, so they were dismissed.

In 2016, when ChatGPT first came on the scene by publishing research about its generative models, it was using image databases like ImageNet—a list of web images first compiled by undergraduate students for $10/hr, and then later by Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing labor pool of people working for pennies to label images a la those “Are you a human?” tests you get when you first log in to a website.

However, it is very difficult to find any information historically on WHERE ChatGPT has gotten most of its images and text. Like most scientific endeavors, AI researchers didn’t stop to think if they should use publically available data—only what it might make possible. From the perspective of AI companies today, revealing those data sources puts them at risk of having those sources taken by a competitor.

Herein lies the main ethical problem of today’s AI. It’s built off the back of underpaid or, more often, unpaid labor, and I don’t mean just college students. The reality is that most of the data used by AI companies is copyright “data” (artwork or writing, as an example), which is then being used to create new artworks that remix the original with no attribution or credit to the creator—which is then being sold for corporate (and individual) gain.

AI companies have asserted that the creation of AI would be impossible without the use of copyright material. They argue that AI falls under the fair use doctrine of copyright, which considers a few factors:

• Purpose and character of use: Is the use commercial or non-commercial, and is it “transformative”?

• The nature of the work being used: How much of the work is used, and what is the importance of that used work in context?

• Effects on the market: Would the use harm the future market for the original work?

With most collage art, found art, found text creative writing, and erasure poetry, most of these parameters are met. That kind of art is unlikely to be confused for the original, it is often “transformative,” i.e., creating a whole new piece of art, usually the original work is excerpted in small amounts, and there is little argument that those types of art can harm the market for the original work.

In the case of AI, opponents can argue that:

• The use is commercial: Most public AI began as a free experiment but has quickly devolved into a pay-per-play format. In addition, AI companies have begun paying for data as a way of avoiding lawsuits.

• The use is in entirety: Most AI companies are using the full text of work/data, not just excerpts.

• The use is harmful: AI is being used for quick commercial gain and harms artists’ abilities to find work.

The only potential difference here is that, from my view, AI is transformative: You can’t often recognize the original referenced work an AI is using because it’s a conglomeration of datasets.

Let’s take a step back and imagine a Utopian landscape. What if AI companies HAD asked creatives for permission to use their work?

Let’s say a set of writers wanted to pool their work into an experiment. They give their books to a data company and allow them to create AI from them. In turn, the writers are paid a portion of the proceeds from the project. That is an experiment I would be interested in seeing. What would it look like if AI was used responsibly and with permission?

Well, I personally feel it would be kind of like today’s music streaming model. Most music artists don’t get a lot of money from streaming. It has shifted the focus for musicians on touring and merch, making the actual creative object of a downloadable song, not the main revenue stream.

Of course, this would probably never happen because the AI industry simply does not see the data it is using as a creative endeavor with value. The reality is that our society has already very strongly devalued creative work, making it impossible for most creatives to make a living. STEM is king, baby.

They will never put a poet on the moon.

AI Is Accessible . . . Or Is It?

One of the breakthroughs in AI that I’m actually fascinated by is its use in disability and access. AI has been used to create more responsive prosthetics, improve reading skills and text-to-speech or translations, map wheelchair-accessible spaces, and so on.

On the other hand, AI is not generally designed with accessibility in mind. A research study by Maitreya Shah at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society recently found that most AI developers view data related to disabilities as “outlier data” that is often excluded. Shah also found that most AI was not created with disabled people involved in high-level decision-making. (Harvard Gazette). In my research, I found very little AI actually being used in real-life accessibility situations that didn’t also have some limitation or failure, which is frustrating given the potential.

I think that when asked if their work could be used in AI for the purposes of disability and accessibility, many creatives would agree to that use. It’s not that we don’t want technology to help people—it’s that often, the people creating the technology don’t have that goal in mind.

Most of the tools AI purports to have invented—like text-to-speech—were tools already being used before AI as it exists today. So, while it may seem easy to say: “AI is good for accessibility, so we should use it,” the truth is way more complex.

We have to be able to hold complexity about these topics. Could we create accessibility AND credit the artists behind the data? Is there a future where technology puts those most vulnerable first, ahead of corporate profits?

The frustrating part of the accessibility conversation is that I don’t think most people with disabilities want new technology at the risk of damaging creative people’s livelihoods. It frames the discussion in an “all or nothing” way, which is really harmful on both sides. Of course most people want people with disabilities to have more access. Of course people with disabilities aren’t interested in ethically bankrupt access tools.

I Hate to Break it to You, but AI Is Bad at Art

LLMs and generative AI are merely mimickers of language or visual imagery. Because of this, they are generally bad at creating writing or art that is “good”—a subjective value based on many factors.

The easiest example is AI’s propensity in generating art to add digits to hands and make visual leaps in logic that result in uncanny portraiture.

In writing, AI tends to write in a very formal tone, generating nondescript, boring text. For example, if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem, it will generally create a rhyming poem like a sonnet. Why? Well, my theory is that most poetry publicly available online is older poetry or public-domain poetry. Contemporary poetry—which is what most poets who want to get published should be aiming to write—is rarely online. It defies eBook formatting. Most contemporary poetry got its start in print books or chapbooks. So, the history of how we got to a free-verse poetry world is lost on ChatGPT.

Creativity, like writing and art, requires years of practice to get to where the output is “good”—or, more accurately, to where that artwork speaks to its audience. I’ve seen a lot of discussion online that AI “removes barriers” because it allows people to create art without needing to attend art school or have a formal art education. What this does not acknowledge is that you can still become a successful artist without a fancy education. There are many creatives who have made a career without access to those institutions.

Interestingly, I’ve also seen this compared to self-publishing. Print on Demand publishing has radically changed the landscape of book publishing, for good and for bad, depending on who you ask. On the one hand, the ability for writers to get their work into the world has increased massively. This means that underrepresented voices and previously taboo works like erotica now have the following they deserve. The big book publishers are often predatory, quickly becoming a monopoly that privileges the same old voices. On the other hand, Amazon, the main venue for book-buying, is a wasteland of AI and stolen works.

A more convincing argument is that we’re seeing an increasing silo-ification of knowledge. AI could potentially reduce barriers to learning, allowing people to access information at their fingertips.

You know, like the internet. Or libraries.

This argument misses the fact that AI is still pretty bad at its job. With AI being rampant in the errors it creates, we are ignoring that AI, as we know it, wasn’t meant as an information distributor. It wasn’t meant to create law briefs, and maybe it shouldn’t be used to detect cancer.

Recently, there has been an influx of AI spam submissions to major online SFF magazines like Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine. Two things are happening here: AI techbros who want to convince writers it’s an easy way to make a quick buck are targeting short story markets via YouTube training videos as a way to boost their subscribers (Earn $10k a month making viral short stories with AI!—as if it were that easy.) Secondly, AI generally has a text limit. So, publishers who are accepting book submissions are less likely to get those AI-generated works, while short fiction publishers who are open to public submissions often get spammed with thousands of works.

Of course, this harms the writers who have put their hard work into writing short fiction because it means markets will have to figure out if a work is AI or not, determine how to weed out the fake stories, and close for submissions in short windows that make it challenging for writers to send in their work.

The gray area here is that SFF is often a whisper network of rules, guidelines, and barriers for new writers. Most people interested in writing short fiction probably haven’t considered the ramifications of using AI. Heck, I think most people don’t understand how AI works. And new writers, often excited about the creative aspect of these tools, are re-radicalized by the Get Rich Quick scammers when the community immediately accuses them of being trash for using AI. This pushes those new writers into the spaces where AI is accepted because, after all, who wants to be told they are wrong? It’s the same story of new writers thinking writing a book is a quick way to make money, not realizing that writing is, in fact, hard.

AI Detectors Are Also Bad, Y’all

Okay, we get that AI is bad. So let’s ban it! 😬 The last myth I want to debunk here is that AI can be reliably detected. With recent backlash in the writing community over AI and its impacts on creatives, I’ve seen a very disturbing trend of people taking a morally superior, high-ground stance against AI and claiming that they are “experts” at detecting AI.

The unfortunate reality is that nobody is an AI-detecting expert. What makes AI so insidious is its ability to be tweaked to where, depending on the user’s skill set, it is virtually impossible to detect.

Most AI-written stories and art are pretty recognizable because, as I’ve said, they are bad. LLMs use similar patterns of language based on the data they have, and those patterns become quickly obvious when you’re reading or looking at art generated by AI. But what about AI used to correct grammar or spelling? AI used to generate a prompt? AI used to create a story that the writer then rewrites or revises? There are endless ways AI can be used and no real good way to detect it.

AI detectors, or websites that claim to be able to detect AI written or drawn work have cropped up as a secondary monetary stream by companies looking to capitalize on the trend. And people who want to be anti-AI champions have been, in my opinion, far too fast to use them to try and out AI users.

Recent studies have found that AI detectors don’t work. Studies have found that AI detectors are inconsistent and often create false positives, are not accurate or reliable, and, worst of all, are biased against non-native English writers.

However, this isn’t the least of the problems with AI detectors. Most research has also found that AI detectors, by their nature, rely on AI. It makes sense that in order to find out if something is AI, you have to run it through AI. Furthermore, who is to say that AI detectors are not also collecting data on the text put into their programs, saving that data to use later in AI?

This means that any solution to the AI problem that relies on AI detectors is problematic. By putting someone else’s work into an AI detector, you are exposing their work to the risk of theft and misuse.

Let’s say you decide like some writing organizations have suggested, to ban AI writing from a major writing award. How do you prove that work was AI? Do you make the writer show receipts in the form of early drafts? Do you force writers to track their writing? What about writers who work by hand in first drafts or writers who don’t have a good tracking system for their files? The rabbit holes this gets into are exhausting. The only reliable way of telling if a piece of writing used AI is by asking the writer. And if someone doesn’t see AI as an ethical issue, they are unlikely to be honest about AI use.

“The Toothpaste Is Out of the Tube”

AI proponents want you to believe you are somehow missing out on something by not using AI. It’s the YOLO of creativity, meant to convince creatives that their work could be better and their processes faster by dangling the ever-elusive carrot of financial success in front of them. The phrase I’m currently exhausted by is, “The toothpaste is already out of the tube with AI, so you might as well accept it.”

The reality is that most creative adventures take time, energy, and, yes, often money to succeed. Most people don’t want to put in the effort. When confronted with the ethical quandary of AI, most people also don’t want to put in the effort to see a future where creatives gain what they actually need: a larger audience and support.

The toothpaste quandary mystifies me. It’s like any other large issue of advocacy. Do we say, “The toothpaste is out of the tube, so we shouldn’t fight for racial equality?” or “The toothpaste is out of the tube, so we shouldn’t fight against climate change?” Hell no. Are we really this nihilistic?

Acknowledging that AI is bad means also making the personal choice not to use it—but it also means being a voice against that technology. Like any issue dealing with corporate greed and the capitalization of unpaid labor, the solution is advocacy. We need more regulation on AI and a government response to AI’s threats to copyright. We need AI companies to be forced to compensate those who have provided the data to make their product saleable.

And we are already seeing just that. The number of lawsuits and government actions against AI increases each month. The New York Times has reported that AI companies are seeing training data sources dry up as more and more sites listen to customers who don’t want their data used to train AI.

Writers who are all too eager to use AI without thinking about the ramifications (after all, it’s already out there, right?) may face copyright lawsuits against their work. This post from law firm BakerHostetler outlines the current legislation regarding AI and copyright,

If we can create AI, we can definitely MacGyver that toothpaste back into the tube. Or at least, I have to believe that advocacy matters and that we can make change in the world.

I’m Back to Hiding in the Woods

This post has gotten way longer than I intended, but I hope it has been helpful in sussing out some of the problems, myths, and issues surrounding AI and creativity. From my perspective, I’m skeptical of AI with the hope that we can find technologies that are more ethically created. But I’d love to know your thoughts. Leave them in the comments below.

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My short story “Every Son a Reaver” appears in the Flame Tree Fiction anthology, Morgana Le Fay: New and Ancient Arthurian Tales (Out in April!)

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Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.  National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early!

Self-Editing for Writers DATE: 4 Weeks Starting March 3rd, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops  Price: $299 The best editor for a story is the author who wrote it. Every writer is different, and how you approach revising your work can vary based on the project. The key to self-editing is to see the bigger picture. Explore techniques for self-revising with step-by-step guidance from a freelance editor. Learn about the different types of editing, from developmental/content edits to copy/line editing and proofreading. You'll develop a personalized editing checklist that you can take with you from project to project, tweaking as you go. Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

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Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

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ster for Re-visning Your Poems

Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA), once remarked that speculative poetry would gain recognition in major genre awards when there was a work important enough to warrant that recognition. In her book, The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook (2005), she recalls advocating for poets to be able to join SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association) and failing, noting that she doubted she would see a book of poetry recognized by a major literary award in her lifetime.

I wish she was around to see 2025. Ten years after her death, the two major science fiction and fantasy awards (the Hugos and the Nebulas) are now both home to a poetry category. However, the legacy of advocacy Elgin carried cannot and should not end there. Despite what may seem like a full-throated acknowledgment of the genre, these awards are simply not enough.

Please allow me this small speech from my own personal well of dream-dust: Speculative Poetry is just as valuable and diverse a form as any other structure in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, and as such, it deserves to be fully recognized by major awards.

Erasure poem of the SFWA guidelines, circa 2022, Text reads: Erasing the SFWA membership Guidelines. Q: Does Poetry count? A: Poetry does not count. A referendum asked the question if poetry should be allowed and was rejected.

The above is an erasure poem I created in 2022 using the guidelines for membership for the most well-known and much-praised science fiction and fantasy writers association, SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association). About a year later, SFWA decided to allow poets to qualify for membership. A few months later, I decided to join SFWA with the goal of joining the SFWA poetry committee and becoming an advocate for lesser-acknowledged and underrepresented forms like poetry, flash fiction, and nonfiction. In 2024, the SFWA poetry committee was able to spearhead the creation of the first Nebula Award category for poetry.

Imagine my delight when I learned that the Hugo Awards would also play host to a poetry award at 2025’s WorldCon. 2025 is truly a historic year for speculative poetry.

You can read more about the process of creating the award in the below interview that I participated in with the SFWA poetry committee co-chair, Wendy Van Camp:

SFWA Presents: Get to Know…Our New Comics and Poetry Nebula Awards - SFWA

A conversation with the SFWA Poetry and the SFWA Comics Committee leads on the two new Nebula Awards for speculative poetry and speculative comics to be first presented at the 2026 Nebula Awards Ceremony.

www.sfwa.org/2025/02/18/sfwa-presents-get-to-knowthe-road-to-sfwas-new-comics-and-poetry-nebula-awards

So, why do I think that speculative poetry still needs more advocacy?

Having poetry as a category for the Hugos and the Nebulas is a huge win for poets. But it’s not enough.

Why? Because speculative poetry is still the persona non grata of the speculative literature world, poetry itself is far less recognized in the world of literature as a whole, despite being quite popular (In 2022, the NEA found over 29 million people read or consume poetry. There is no such large-scale survey for SFF genres.)

Despite poetry being recognized with a Hugo, it is vital that I point out that the Hugo is a special award this year. That means we may not see a poetry award post-2025. It’s kind of a test case. Secondly, the Hugo is just for individual poems, not poetry books or anthologies. Furthermore, the Hugo only recognizes poems that are three lines or more, which is a shame because there are many fantastic two- and one-line speculative poems.

Despite poetry being a now-permanent fixture on the Nebula ballot, only individual poems are eligible, not poetry books or anthologies. The Nebula Award is broader than the Hugo, with poems of any line length allowed.

From the perspective of someone on the poetry committee at SFWA, the main reason I think we need more advocacy is that while poetry is now award-recognized, there are still caveats to those awards that other speculative poetry. When making the decision to only“ask” for a poetry category on the Nebula, the committee did so because we knew it was the safest first step. However, I’m not sure what it will take to see the award widened to include books.

Speculative poetry has a rich history that dates back as far as genre itself. While it could be argued that the earliest poetic epics, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, are speculative in nature, it’s not just that speculative poetry has existed forever, it’s that it has been a vital, embedded part of SFF culture from the beginning.

Isaac Asimov said, "The dropping of the atom bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines".

Asimov’s quote always makes me wonder what it might take for poetry to be seen as respectable. Poetry is uniquely situated to grab readers’ attention when it comes to processing today’s horrific news. Furthermore, many speculative poets today are also working at the juxtaposition of current events. Asimov’s quote is also an indicator of when things shifted, and SFF became A Thing.

The subject of poetry in pulps is the topic of research I’ve been conducting for a few years now. If we trace SFF’s roots to the golden era of science fiction, we find magazines like Weird Tales, first established in 1923, regularly publishing speculative poetry. It is frustrating that although it's easy to find information about short stories published during this time in the pulps, it's harder to find any repository of poems published in these magazines. Poems were often unmarked in the table of contents, or if they were, they simply said "verse" or "poem". Nevertheless, magazines like Galaxy, Scientific American, Science, all published poetry.

It’s important to look at these magazines in context. They can be seen as an offshoot of another important touchpoint in poetry history: The penny dreadfuls or chapbooks. These were affordable, short pamphlets or magazines that were distributed in the late 1800s, often featuring speculative or genre-adjacent topics (vampires, murder, urban myths, Westerns, etc.) These early magazines often featured poetry, including folk songs and fairy tales.

Early golden era magazines focused on speculative poetry itself include Challenge (1950-1951), Kineses (1968-1970), Speculative Poetry Review (1977-1980), Uranus (1978-1984), Treaders of Starlight (1978), Cthulhu Calls, Umbral (1978), Star*Line (1978-current).

It wasn’t just magazines that featured speculative poetry. Speculative poetry books, while much more difficult to research given the lack of resources (most SFF pulp magazines have been archived online for researchers), have existed since the beginning of SFF. Some have called the poetry collection Wine of Wonder by Lilith Lorraine (penname of Mary Maude Dunn Wright) from 1952 the first-ever volume of science fiction poetry. One of the earliest speculative poetry anthologies drawing from the pulps was Holding Your Eight Hands (1969), edited by Edward Lucie-Smith.

Perhaps it is not enough to argue that because speculative poetry has been a part of SFF from its inception, it should then receive the same recognition as short fiction and novels. You might argue that there is no audience for poetry (I think 29 million readers would disagree), or that poetry is too “high-brow” for SFF (although good luck telling SFF short story writers that the genre isn’t “literary”), or that speculative poetry isn’t published as much as short fiction (you’ll have just as much luck convincing me reading itself is in decline, given the precarious state of SFF short fiction).

The fact is, poetry has been here, it is here, and it will be here. We’re not going anywhere.

Why the Resistance to Poetry?

A far more interesting argument, which I will mostly save for another article, is the question of WHY people are so opposed to the recognition of speculative poetry.

In the fantastic 2007 book Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, Brian Stableford makes the excellent point that poetry has always been at odds with science: “The anxiety that the progress of science has devalued or devastated the poetic element of the human imagination—by ‘unweaving the rainbow’, as John Keats put it—is as strong now as it ever was, and as plausible” (xviii). (Stableford is using the term “poetry” here as a kind of stand-in for “the arts,” i.e., narrative literature that incorporates science elements such as science fiction.)

He refers to poet John Keats’ assertion that Newton “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.” And I think this is an interesting point: Perhaps poetry is subconsciously seen as separate because of the decades-old battle between science and science fiction.

Sadly, I think the reason why speculative poetry has seen little recognition is far more sinister. My research has indicated that while it’s rare to see women writing short fiction published in pulp magazines at the same rate as men, I believe the rate of women publishing speculative poetry was much higher. Poetry is often perceived as feminine—in 2006, a survey by the Poetry Foundation found that people mostly believe poetry is primarily read by women.

Furthermore, I have a sneaking suspicion that speculative poetry is quite diverse in comparison to the larger SFF world, if only because the barrier to publication with poetry is much lower—or more interestingly, because poetry is a bigger space to experiment and diverse voices often operate on the fringe of literary conventions. I don’t have data to support this idea, but I do know that many writers I have met who write science fiction and fantasy got their start in poetry. A skim through the SFWA introductions thread on the forums showed that many people were writing poetry but transitioned into other forms to gain membership prior to 2023. Because it can be less time-intensive (can, not is) to write a poem, writers often start there and quickly realize that if they ever want larger recognition, they will need to publish novels. Many SFF writers also write poetry. There are countless examples of this in SFF, including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and so on. The so-called “ease” of writing poetry angers some members of SFF, who are frustrated at the idea of someone winning a Hugo with just a one-line poem.

For me, that idea is magical. Structure does not matter—what matters is writing something that speaks to people. Even if it’s just one line.

A Call to Action

I would love to see an absolute bonkers number of poems nominated for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award in the first eligibility year. If you love speculative poetry, please consider nominating. The Hugo Award is open for nominations until March 14, 2025. If you were a WSFS member for 2024 Glasgow Worldcon or if you are a WSFS member for Seattle Worldcon, you can nominate poems published in 2024. SFWA members can nominate for the Nebula Award, which covers poems published in 2025.

Beyond that, share poetry. Share this post, share the poems you love, read more poems, buy poetry books, support poets.

Lastly, write and submit speculative poetry. If you’ve never tried it out, now is the time.

Write what you love, love what you write.

My short story “Every Son a Reaver” appears in the Flame Tree Fiction anthology, Morgana Le Fay: New and Ancient Arthurian Tales (Out in April!)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.  National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early!

Self-Editing for Writers DATE: 4 Weeks Starting March 3rd, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops  Price: $299 The best editor for a story is the author who wrote it. Every writer is different, and how you approach revising your work can vary based on the project. The key to self-editing is to see the bigger picture. Explore techniques for self-revising with step-by-step guidance from a freelance editor. Learn about the different types of editing, from developmental/content edits to copy/line editing and proofreading. You'll develop a personalized editing checklist that you can take with you from project to project, tweaking as you go. Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

And now a word from our poetic sponsor…

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As a writer who spends a lot of time online, I've often heard the question, “Are you a plotter or a pantser?”

If these words are new to you, a "plotter" is someone who plots out their work and knows where their story will go before they start writing the first draft, and a "pantser" is someone who writes without an outline or a clear plot in mind—by the seat of their pants. You might also hear "outliner" instead of plotter, or "discovery writer" instead of pantser, or other terms that get at the same basic divide: outline or no outline.

Usually, these concepts are only applied to novels. There are workshops out there that teach you to outline, sometimes loosely and other times in exhaustive, prescriptive detail, while others offer techniques to "let your character tell their story" or let your imagination take you—and the book you're writing—where it will.

In most cases, I'm a plotter. I need the structure of an outline to figure out the story I want to tell—or at least to figure out how to tell it in a way that other people will find engaging. That's been the case pretty much ever since I started writing for publication, and it's still the case today, roughly fifteen years later.

When I'm writing a novel or novella, I definitely need that outline and its structure. Otherwise, all my work devolves into two characters standing around talking at each other about nothing. It’s interminable and dull, even for me as the writer.

Most of the time, I also outline short stories. I even outline flash fiction, at least if I'm telling a traditional story rather than writing something experimental.

I don't think I'm unique in doing this, but it was only recently that I realized outlining flash fiction might be unusual and that what I consider an "outline" is probably not what most folks think of when they hear that word.

Introducing the Understory

When some writers talk about outlines and hitting plot beats, it can sound like they're demanding you follow a rigid, unchangeable formula to make your story succeed—although they are almost certainly not. And even when they don't, I've seen (and followed!) techniques like that offer page or wordcount numbers for when a thing needs to happen (the Save the Cat method), or that suggest using detailed spreadsheets to move from elevator pitch to scene-by-scene descriptions (the Snowflake Method).

These types of outlining can be useful for novels, so long as you understand they’re a guide and not a strict, prescriptive formula, but they don't scale well to short stories, and certainly don't work at flash length.

And they don't work very well for how I write anything, since I often start writing to an outline, change my mind while drafting, and go back and revise the outline to match where I'm going with the story now. Sometimes, I do this several times!

Perhaps as a result, I've struggled to come up with a way of explaining outlines that doesn't make them sound like rigid, inescapable restraints. Even metaphorical terms like "road map" don't quite work, because maps (while they may change over time!) aren't going to suddenly change their shape in the course of a single journey.

Lately, though, I've been learning to watercolor, which means I've also been learning to draw. And this is where I've figured out a metaphor for outlining short stories that I like. So let's take a quick detour to the fine art world and examine the concept of the underdrawing.

In painting, an underdrawing is a preliminary sketch or painting applied to a canvas. They're intended not as a strict outline to copy but as more of a guide, a process of trying out forms and "envision and develop" their composition as it will appear in the final piece (definition from the University of Delaware).

A couple of crucial things to understand about underdrawings:

•  they can be as detailed or as simple as the artist prefers—sometimes they're even just blotches of color to represent shape or light values

•  the finished work can differ drastically from the underdrawing (for example, check out Edward Munch’s underdrawing for The Madonna [cn for nudity])

•  there are a bunch of different techniques and media you can use to make an underdrawing, and none of them are wrong

If we take the idea of an underdrawing and transpose it to the written word, we're left not with an outline you have to follow but with an understory. An underdrawing is not an exact outline to follow while painting and an understory is not that for writing, either. It’s more akin to a rough sketch—or even just a study in value and color—of what you want your story to be when it's finished.

 It's a tool you can use when outlining short stories to help you put your vision into words that tell a satisfying story. Something you can turn to when you're stuck, or need to be inspired again, or need to see the overall shape of your idea before diving back into the detail work.

And just like an underdrawing and a finished painting, the understory of your written work will almost certainly change by the time you're done with the rough draft and may change more before you consider the story finished.

How to Use an Understory When Outlining Short Stories

That's all well and good, but what does an understory actually look like?

When I’m outlining short stories, I tend to start with an image in mind. Sometimes that will be a character doing something at the story’s pivotal point. Sometimes it will be the last line of the story or the character’s inciting incident. Sometimes, I don’t have an image, just a concept I think is funny, interesting, or weird.

This is the core of my story-to-be, and once I know what it is, I’ll write out a sort of elevator pitch—a one-sentence description that names the character, what they’re trying to do, and what’s stopping them from succeeding. (In art terms, think of this as the roughest of rough figure drawings.)

Next, I’ll break that down into scenes, and usually, I’ll figure out how many words I want to spend on each—especially if what I’m writing is flash fiction. If I’m feeling particularly experimental, my understory might be as esoteric or vague as a list of neat things I want to reference in each scene of the story, like the example below for an unwritten flash fiction story where I just had a list of poems I wanted each scene to allude to both in form and in content.

Usually, though, I follow something closer to the Snowflake method. First, I figure out the number of scenes and what should be in each, generally speaking. Then I flesh out each scene description in writing with a sentence or two that describes the key role or roles it plays in the story and what needs to happen in it before I move to the next one.

In this example (from an unpublished short story), I also included how many words I thought each scene should be. That’s not too hard when you’ve been writing short stories for fifteen years and can roughly estimate scene length based on what it contains! The word counts help me stay on track and keep my story the size I want it to be. Especially useful for flash, where every word counts. (NB, maybe I’m not that good at it because the story that came out of this outline ended up being 5000 words—more than double the 2100 I estimated. Oops!)

One really nice thing about an understory is it lets me write out of order. If I’m super excited about the ending but a little unclear on the middle, I can bounce around to where my excitement takes me. If I’m writing on a computer (which I usually am these days), I’ll put my scene descriptions straight into the document and write around them.

Even when they’re super short, like “Kaya tosses stuff out”, the bracketed pseudo-scenes give me a good sense of the entire story’s shape long before I’m done with the draft, and a feeling of progress too. It’s great to cross those brackets out and replace them with actual words!

Understory? I Barely Even Know ‘ee!

You might not be taken by the idea of an “understory” or by the idea of outlining short stories at all. But it works well for me, at least.

If you’re stuck on your latest piece, why not give it a try?

About the Author

Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction, poetry, and (Nebula-nominated!) interactive fiction. His short story collection, The Butterfly Disjunct: And Other Stories, is out now from Interstellar Flight Press, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Asimov's, Fantasy, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Nature, and various other places.

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Welcome back to my series on practical ways to finish your book using the power of psychology. Each one of this ten-part series presents a different method you can try to finally just GET IT DONE and WRITE THE FRIGGIN BOOK. If you haven’t read the other articles in this series, you can check them out below:

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part One

Sprint to the Finish Line: JUST DO IT. How to take a book from draft to ready to publish, with prompts for your writing journal

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/justdoit

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Two

Boost your writing productivity with if-then planning. Overcome blocks, stay motivated, and achieve your goals with this simple strategy.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/if-then-planning

Ten Ways to Finish (Really, Finish) a Writing Project: Part Three

Discover clever tips to boost your creativity with writing prompts and expert advice for writers to enhance your creative writing productivity.

newsletter.hlwalrath.com/p/trick-yourself

Image from Zombies, Run!

Gamify: A Tiny Dose of Dopamine, You Cute Little Mouse Mouse Pushing a Lever

I played a running app called Zombies, Run! for a long time when I first started running. Essentially, it’s an audiobook-type app that gives you a fun scenario to listen to while you run. Zombies chase you—you can even turn on an option that encourages you to run faster to outrun them. It really helps to get me moving when I’m not feeling like running because it distracts me from my negative thoughts. These days, I’m not using the app as much because I’ve learned to find enjoyment in just the act of running.

In psychology, using game-like elements in non-game contexts is called “gamification.” According to psychologists, gamification can help with making work more fun, education, crowdsourcing, data-collection, healthcare, marketing, social networks, and even environmental protection, to name a few (Sailer et al, “How Gamification Motivates”)

Gamification can help you start a new task or motivate you to complete a project. Like my running game, making something more fun is one of the easiest ways to finish a project. We all have aspects of writing that are not our favorite part of the process. For me, it’s revision. I have to literally force myself to sit down and revise each week. It’s one foot in front of the other again the whole way. But when I’m drafting, I’m having a blast.

So, one trick I do is to allow myself to write a shorter, more fun, completely different thing while I’m revising (not at the exact same time, but in the same span of time). I used to think you HAVE to only focus on one project at a time. I love juggling multiple projects (have you read my blog?), so being allowed to work on fun drafts makes me happy while I plug away at the stupid revision.

Another method I’ve tried is to discovery write—but as revision. What I mean by that is that I’m a discovery writer (pantser), so writing to an outline is really hard for me. Revising, which often feels rigid, is also hard. So I allow myself to rewrite portions of my project without looking back at the first version. I literally re-write the project piece by piece. This always surprises me because I usually end up with two similar drafts. My brain remembers the draft.

There are endless apps that gamify writing now. You can try timed apps that make writing fast the goal or more project-specific apps that give you an award when you reach a certain word count. You might even create your own game by coming up with rewards for your goals.

But for me, gamification is more about letting myself have fun.

Gamification can tap into our basic human need for reward. It creates an external reward for writing, which gives your brain a dopamine boost. By associating positive feelings with writing, you’ll feel less dread about the process. Even if you’re just playing the game against yourself, making your writing process fun can make writing less stressful and more relaxing. And, the game process makes “losing” less scary.

Image from Hades (Supergiant Games)

A Game Example: Hades

One game I’ve been loving lately is Hades. The game is a pretty simple fighting game, with the story based on Greek mythology. But what I love most is the structure of the game. The goal of the game is essentially failure. Every time you open the game, the goal is to play through a series of different levels, slowly building your skill until you can reach new levels. But your character dies and is regenerated after each failure. The failure leads to skill boosts, plus it’s addictive.

While some gamers might get frustrated with this style of game, the majority seem to love it, despite the constant failure. This is the basis of most games. For example, most arcade games are hard enough yet still fun enough to make you want to keep putting coins in. The fun isn’t so much in each play but in seeing how you can improve.

It got me thinking about writing. What if we could think about writing as a game? Too often, new writers get frustrated when the first thing they write isn’t successful, when they get a rejection (which they perceive as failure), when they get negative feedback, and so on. But when you play a game, you don’t get personally invested, you just TRY AGAIN. I think the try again concept is a huge takeaway for how gamification can help writers.

I often tell my students that submitting work for publication is a numbers game. If you don’t submit at all, you will never get published, obviously. But if you submit less, you will have less of a chance. The best bet is to submit as often as you can (depending on your goals). And when you’ve exhausted the opportunities for a piece, the next step is to write a new one.

If you struggle on a certain step of finishing a project, think of it as a game. You wouldn’t give up because you can’t defeat the boss, right? Instead, you’d grind until you get better, trying again and again. There’s no quick way to win at writing. It’s about building your skill set.

Leveling up Your Project Process

When I work with my freelance editing clients, my goal is to level up the project. A writer might come to me with a fairly decent draft. My approach is to look for how the draft could be stronger. Sometimes, what a draft needs isn’t yet in the writer’s skill set. I might direct writers to workshops, resources, or other places where they can learn how to level up their writing.

Like anything you want to do in life, practice is key. I can’t say it makes perfect (is any piece of writing really ever perfect?), but it does help hone the writer’s craft.

Even the most experienced writers have room to grow and learn.

Here are some ways you can level up your writing skills to help finish a project:

• What does the project need, and how can you get better at that skill set?

• Practice giving critique. By giving feedback, we learn what kind of feedback is most helpful to receive.

• Take workshops centered around your project’s genre so you can grow as a writer.

• Read new authors and take notes. Sometimes just reading how someone else solves a problem can open up a locked door in terms of your own project.

• Read books on writing and find tools that work for your style.

• Become a writing advice magpie: Take what works and leave the rest.

• Get better at mindfulness: Be aware of the choices you make in writing and why they matter.

• Find friends to play with: Gamifying writing is more fun when you’re not alone.

Ask Yourself:

What do you love about writing? What do you love about YOUR writing? How can you channel the parts you love, like drafting or revision or critique, into letting yourself have fun? The reason I harp on process so much is this: If there’s a part of your process that isn’t working, you have my permission to let it go and figure out a better way, even if that way is not how everyone else seems to succeed.

A Gamification Writing Prompt: Find Your Joy

Try this journal exercise: Write a list of what you love about writing. Now write a list about what you love about YOUR specific process and strengths as a writer. Think of this like gratitude journaling—allow yourself to feel grateful about what you enjoy. Writing isn’t a thing you decided to do overnight. It’s a part of your life that matters to you. Why?

Now make a list of rewards you can give yourself for finishing steps toward the final goal. What do you want to accomplish? What smaller steps can you take to get there? Are there any ways you can level up your writing skillset? Find rewards to assign to these goals that might really motivate you—even if it’s something as simple as an ice cream cone. My favorite reward is getting to start the next project.

ou do you.

My short story “Every Son a Reaver” appears in the Flame Tree Fiction anthology, Morgana Le Fay: New and Ancient Arthurian Tales (Out in April!)

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

Confessional Poetry DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession.  National Flash Fiction Month: 30 Short Stories in 30 Days  DATE: 4 Weeks Starting July 1st, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 This generative workshop is chock full of 30 writing prompts for short story writers. Whether you write micro fiction, flash fiction, or short stories, these 30 prompts are meant to inspire and support you in this unique writing challenge. You've heard of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), where poets write 30 poems in 30 days, and you've probably heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers try to write a novel in a month. Now, you can do the same with short stories. Whether you're writing to a specific theme, assembling stories for a collection, or want to try writing a series of connected stories, this workshop will explore new contemporary structures like The Tryptich or The Wikipedia Entry. Open to writers of all genres--from realism to memoir to speculative fiction. Please note: This class has sold out every time I have offered it. I suggest you register early!

Self-Editing for Writers DATE: 4 Weeks Starting March 3rd, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops  Price: $299 The best editor for a story is the author who wrote it. Every writer is different, and how you approach revising your work can vary based on the project. The key to self-editing is to see the bigger picture. Explore techniques for self-revising with step-by-step guidance from a freelance editor. Learn about the different types of editing, from developmental/content edits to copy/line editing and proofreading. You'll develop a personalized editing checklist that you can take with you from project to project, tweaking as you go. Writing the Speculative Novel DATE: 4 Weeks Starting May 5th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Dallas ​Price: $299 Learn how to write (and finish) a speculative novel from outlining to revising to submissions. Learn tips from a freelance editor who has worked with successful speculative writers to edit their books to perfection. With over ten years of experience in editing both self-published and big fiver writers, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to longform writing. In this class, we’ll explore techniques for outlining, critiquing, and revising the speculative novel. Learn how to create your own outline that you can re-use for future projects. Learn how to take on revision from the big picture to nitty gritty proofreading. Craft your book so that it has the best possible chance to get published! So You Want to Be a Book Editor DATE: 4 Weeks Starting September 9th, 2025 TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops Price: $299 ​Publishing survives on the work of editors. If you’ve ever considered becoming a freelance editor, this workshop will give you the tools needed to get your business started. Learn about the different types of editing, how to structure your editing business, and what resources exist for freelance editors. A nitty-gritty, in-depth guide to becoming a guide for writers.

Self-Paced Workshops (Sign Up Anytime!)

Self-Paced Course: 30 Poems In 30 Days DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $149 This class came out of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which happens every year in April. Similarly, the goal of this self-paced class is to write 30 poems in 30 days. However, you might write one poem a day, or several poems in a day, and then give yourself a break. It’s totally up to you! Whether you’re writing to a specific theme, assembling a group of poems for a chapbook, or you want to try writing a longer poetic sequence, this workshop is meant to support you with generative prompts and experiences to get you creating plenty of new work. Self-Paced Course: Journaling for Poets DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Poets are observers. One way to keep track of your observations and ideas is through a writing journal. In this workshop, we'll cover the basics of journaling for poets, not just as a method of processing and keeping track of your thoughts, but as a method of improving your writing life and working towards a career as a writer.  In this workshop, you'll cover how to manage large ideas or projects, track submissions, create goals, revising, and more, all while exploring popular methods of journaling to find the one that works for you. If you feel out of sorts or disorganized in your writing life, this workshop is for you!

Self-Paced Course: Queer Poetics DATE: Ongoing ​TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn ​PRICE: $99 This workshop is an intersectional primer on LGBTQIA+ writers throughout the history of poetry. We’ll explore poets like Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde, but also the contemporary queer poets who have catapulted into the mainstream like Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. We’ll write poems alongside and inspired by the voices of queer poetics. This class is meant both for writers who want to explore their queerness and for writers who want to learn more about the history of queer poetry. Self-Paced Course: Writing Resistance Through Erasure, Found Text & Visual Poetry DATE: Ongoing TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Poetry Barn PRICE: $99 Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page.

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