Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe.
She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook.
She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.
Dear Solitude, You are sometimes hard to come by anymore in my beautiful, busy, love-drenched life, but without you, shadows pool in my eyes and I struggle to see or ... Read more
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems ... Read more
I am lucky enough to be a part of a book group for writers and occasionally we choose a book on craft to read alongside whatever novels we are reading. ... Read more
Dear Imagination Tree, Half way into a ten mile run, half way up a doozy of a hill, you shifted my perspective the instant my brain received the sight of ... Read more
Dear Pen and Paper, I bought a manual typewriter from a junk shop downtown Aberdeen and typed my first short story on it. I was eighteen. I didn’t own a ... Read more
The reading didn’t happen. I went to my first Gray Skies Reading Series with a marked-up copy of The Chronology of Water in hand only to find that there had ... Read more
You are a writer. Just consider it. There is nothing that can get get you in the mood for sweeping or writing like a good fight. I don’t care what ... Read more
Dear Adulthood, Why did I not hold you off a while longer? I used to skip classes to spend hours penning ideas into notebooks–black coffee, toasted bagel to fuel my ... Read more
It started with some wild honeysuckle on my way home from writer’s group. A deep red like I’d never seen growing right there at the edge of the parking lot. ... Read more