Why Hire a Writing Coach?

Years ago, I hired a closet declutterer to help me organize my office shelves.  And just last summer, I found someone to teach me how to set up a spreadsheet for business accounting.

None of these tasks came naturally to me. Neither did throwing a Frisbee, following a recipe or figuring out the tip for a restaurant bill!

But with guidance, I learned how. And I got better at them.

Writing isn’t any different. Finding that perfect opening sentence, riveting middle or satisfying ending doesn’t always come naturally. Some of us get stuck at the start. Some lose our way, midstream. Many of us can lose perspective  – and our confidence – in the whole project because we are just too close to the material.

That’s where an experienced, patient and tender-hearted writing coach can make a difference.

Maybe you are pursuing a degree and your academic writing assignments are taking far longer than you think they should. You need help organizing your thoughts and getting them onto the page.

Maybe you are good at your job, but your co-workers are not responding to your emails and reports as you would like. You know these could be better summarized, less wordy and more to the point.

Maybe you’ve been writing personal essays and you are ready to run them by a thoughtful reader. You want feedback from someone who can provide you with concrete suggestions about how to make them better. You want more feedback than what you feel you are getting with your critique group.

Or maybe you are looking to explore your creativity, to experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow, doing something for its own sake.

 To get your toes in the water, consider registering for one of my writing workshops this fall.

Three hours of coaching can jump start you on a project or help you complete one already underway.

For a ready-to-go project, – take a look at my one-month, three-month and one-year programs.

Shake your life up just a bit. Make something by hand.

What if writing – whether it’s for fun, publication, a business or school assignment – could open you up in a different way?

What if writing could lead you to personal discovery?

 

For more information, hop over to my website or send me an email.

 

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My …

Lions. March comes in like a lion …The Spring Issue of Thread – the ninth issue – is now, officially, released, offering essays that are funny, poignant, reflective, sensorial, playful and surrendering. Six essays by six wildly different writers explore what it feels like to be in the wrong job, feel the suffering along with a loved one, reflect over things not said, listen to the sound from a jail cell, mull over the multiple meanings of words and let go in the midst of life changes. The Summer Issue of Thread will be released in June. Watch for Stitch on the first of every month.

Tigers. After months of revision, fingers shaking, I mustered up my inner tiger and pressed SEND last week. My memoir manuscript is now in the hands of an agent. Now, the wait. I’ll keep you posted.

Bears. To be bearish is to be frank, open, direct, candid, honest, outspoken, straightforward and sincere. All of these things happen in writing workshops when we talk about published personal narratives (appropriate when the facilitator’s name is Barish!) The discussion makes us better readers and writers and we have a ton of fun doing it! My six-week, summer writing workshop starts June 20 through August 1. Email me if you’d like to save a spot.

Oh my! I will be offering coaching programs, writing workshops and work-in-progress reviews designed to boost your personal, creative or business goals beginning June 2018. Could one work for you?

New One-to-One Coaching Programs

Do you want to complete a draft of a memoir or personal narrative collection in one year? Develop an outline for a book-length project? Improve your grades, boost your business writing skills or complete an academic writing assignment? You have three ways to get your work started, moving or off of your desk to meet any budget. See more here.

Workplace Writing Workshops

Could you  – or members of your staff  – use a boost for their business writing skills? Consider scheduling a lunchtime learning writing workshop for your staff. For more information, email me.

Work-in-Progress Reviews

Have you been thinking of submitting to Thread or Stitch or some other publication but you feel like you could use some feedback on your work? For $95, I can provide you with a detailed review of your essay. You’ll get a thoughtful response to your work with concrete suggestions for revision. To learn more about how to set up a review, email me at ellen@threadliterary.com.

For updates on these and other goings-on, find me on Facebook.

 

 

A Reluctant Professor. A Grateful Coach

ellen readingFor more than thirty years, I have earned a living – and even a few modest awards – as a writer and editor.

But when I was in middle school, when achievement tests became the standard by which writing and reading skills were determined, low scores indicated that I was struggling with reading comprehension. A teacher-parent huddle sealed the deal and I was sent to work with a tutor.

That’s how it felt at the time anyway.

At 13 and 14, with bad teeth and stringy hair, there was already plenty for me to be embarrassed about, but I remember being mortified about having to be tutored because I wanted to think of myself as a smart girl. And smart girls didn’t need tutors.

But the initial feeling didn’t last beyond my first session. The tutor turned out to be an amiable woman who very swiftly taught me to identify the unique way I absorbed information and how to organize it into words. More poignantly, I see now, she guided me in honoring my individual learning process. She was gentle but firm. Persistent but patient.

My test scores and grades improved after my tutoring sessions, but I was never a stellar student in high school. When I could choose courses in college and graduate school, I fared better. By then I had found my thing and that thing was reading and writing, the very things in which I struggled as a middle-schooler.

I never set out to teach writing. Frankly, it never occurred to me to teach anything at all. I believed I was firmly planted in publishing as a writer and editor. But a director of religious education whom I knew and respected seemed to believe that I had what it took and asked me to teach. I remember saying no the first time she asked. Teach? Me? The B student who needed tutoring? You’ve got to be kidding. A year later, she asked again. She was serious – and I was up for a challenge at the time –  so I gave it a go. And I liked it. A lot. Soon after, a former journalism professor asked me to coach a few students and not long after that, I was hired to teach my first university course.

As a university professor of writing for fifteen years now, I’ve only recently become aware that my teaching approach is borne out of those one-to-one sessions with that tutor. In a room full of students, my inclination is to lean to the individuals because that’s how I found the best stuff inside of me. I first came to understand and respect my own working process in a quiet, private space, working one-to-one in a room with no windows and one witness.

As a consequence, I have become hyper-aware of how each of us processes information differently. Some of us like to hear ourselves speak in the circle. Some of us would rather listen. Some of us read it and get it right there on the spot. Some of us need to read it over many times, away from the classroom, on our own.

Though I still love to teach groups – the energy in a circle of people can be electric and empowering  – working with people individually speaks to my heart. It can be incredibly potent. Like fertilizer for a writer’s growth. And, it’s also personal. In a way, I owe my career to that tutor, who gently pulled and tugged at me while simultaneously holding a mirror so I could see what was inside.

Which, I now recognize, is what I strive for when I work with people one to one.

In January, I am launching three new coaching programs that reflect what I’ve learned over the past decade about how people work. Each program is designed to remove roadblocks to help a person reach a writing goal, while honoring the individuality and uniqueness of that person’s pace and style.

Whether it’s communicating better at work, writing a personal statement a degree application, improving written academic assignments, publishing an essay or writing a book, I have developed coaching scenarios to fit each mission and budget. Whether we work together in a room, face to face, or via technology, I know how to get that great stuff that’s inside a person to show itself on the outside. 

New Coaching Programs for 2018*

Plan to Page (One month)

  • business writing boost at the workplace
  • grade improvement for reading and writing at school
  • completion of a long-form academic writing assignment
  • personal essay for college or graduate school admission
  • preparing an essay for literary publication submission

Path to Publication (Three months)

  • outline for a book-length project
  • family story to the page (to or with an aging family member)

Memoir in Twelve Moons (One year)

Full Moon (weekly) or Half Moon (twice monthly)

  • complete a draft of a memoir or personal narrative collection

*Weekly unless otherwise noted.

To learn more about how these programs could fit your writing goals, email me at ellen@ellenblumbarish.com to schedule a free conversation.

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Photos courtesy of the Blum family, taken sometime in the early 1970s.

 

The Giving Tree

Next week, summer transmutes into fall and here in the Midwest we are already seeing the signs when we look up into the trees and dab our runny noses with tissue. (Autumn allergies, anyone?)

I find myself in a similar state as I return to my memoir manuscript for revision. The roots and trunk of the tree – and most of its woody extensions – are in place. So are the leafy bits. But adjustments will be made; some pruning and trimming, repositioning and reshaping and fertilizing for growth.

Writing a complete draft of a memoir in one year was a promise I made to myself last August. I wanted to get that story that I’ve been trying to tell for so many years onto the page. It was a promise that, just a few weeks ago, was fulfilled.

When you give so much to a tree, it tends to give back.

I had deep doubts that I could actually do it. After all, just the year before I had committed myself publicly to full year without writing. But eight months in to not writing, a title and a structure for the story that has taking up lodging in my head, body and soul landed in my lap and I couldn’t help but begin to write. You can read about that here.

There have been a multitude of other broken promises: getting to that weekly yoga class, meditating, eating less bread and drinking less wine. Though these fell under the motivating category of mental, physical and spiritual health, there was something more compelling about capturing this story in words. The pull to write felt like an emergency; like my life depended on it.

Apparently this is a thing.

In her book, “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness” Emily Esfahani Smith writes that there are four pillars of meaning in a person’s life: belonging, purpose, transcendence and, I love this part, storytelling.

“Our storytelling impulse emerges from a deep-seated need all humans share: the need to make sense of the world. We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder – to find the signal in the noise. We see faces in the clouds, hear footsteps in the rustling of leaves, and detect conspiracies in unrelated events. We are constantly taking pieces of information and adding a layer of meaning to them; we couldn’t function otherwise,” Smith writes.

A traumatizing event from my childhood was stalking me, insisting itself on me because, as Smith suggests, “Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events of our lives, good and bad, because those are the experiences that we need to make sense of, those are the experiences that shape us.”

Which can be very illuminating, engaging stuff.

The writing has been incredibly challenging, but making room and time for it has not. I kept fairly close to my deadlines – it helped tremendously to work with an editor I trust on this project to whom I promised pages each month – but I certainly didn’t write every day. There were even some weeks that I couldn’t write, life getting in the way and all. But when I did sit down to write, I was focused and productive.

So I have a manuscript. It needs revision and expansion and this will take a while – probably months. But now I know – in my bones – that there are practical and creative ways to get a big story from one’s life onto the page in twelve months.

Since I’m making good on my promises now, I’ll boldly offer another: To keep you updated on my progress – the victories as well as the disappointments – to reveal the transformational colors of these pages from manuscript to book in the hope that one healthy tree might stimulate a forest.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving Your Mark

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Getting naked is the last thing we want to think about in winter. Especially those of us who live where snow falls.

But I think the more we mirror nature rather than draw the curtains on it, the closer we get to feeling balanced. Steady. A reasonable goal during these very unsteady times.

That’s my plan for this upcoming winter and early spring. To get a little bit naked. Bare a little more of my soul. Leave my mark in the world. In words.

Like the tree that falls in the woods when no one is around, your mark won’t reverberate unless you share it with others.

So let’s get naked together this winter and spring. I’m starting the year off with a one-day writing workshop in the woods (January 14th at Little House of Glencoe) and following it up with half-day, four-five-and-six-week workshops, as well as private coaching options.

Go to the Workshop page of my website for more details or email me with questions.

Let’s strip down to the bare essentials. We’ll leave quite an impression.

 

WRITING WORKSHOPS with ELLEN BLUM BARISH

WINTER/SPRING 2017

Half-Day & One-Day Workshops

Friday, December 16; 10:45 – 12:15 pm (Beth Emet The Free Synagogue)

Saturday, January 14; 10 – 4 pm (Little House of Glencoe)

Friday, February 3; 1-2:30 pm (Women’s Exchange)

Thursday, April 13; 9:30 – 11:30 am (Off Campus Writers Workshop)

Four, Five & Six-Week Workshops

Thursdays, March 2 – 23; 10:30 – noon (Women’s Exchange)

Tuesdays, February 7 – March 14; 1-3:30 pm (Skokie)

Wednesdays, May 3 – 31; 1-3 pm (New Trier Extension)