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.
Assignment: At least four times this week, set a timer for at least one hour and sit down to write. The rules: 1. Don’t answer your phone, check your email ... Read more
This musing goes out to Chris, because more than anything I want to spend this coming year achieving goals and enjoying life with him. So, baby, here is to a ... Read more
O, parentheses! I have n’er seen you so buttered across the page… The use of parentheses (in addition to parenthetical commas) throughout Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is a point ... Read more
For the most part, the character sketches in The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, portray characters who are stuck and the writers do not offer the reader ... Read more
I chose to read Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss because History of Love had stirred me to writerly adoration and because the blurb I read promised a ... Read more
The truth is, March was not one of the books I planned read for this mailing. It’s probably not a book I would have picked up at all on my ... Read more
I find that writing poems during meetings makes it easier to pay attention… No time for reluctance. Observe buds about to bloom, new colors waiting to paint the world from ... Read more
“But, no matter, the road is life” (211). In my copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, this line is not just underlined, but circled, no note next to ... Read more
The “Zooey” section of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger begins thus: The facts at hand presumable speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even ... Read more
I borrowed the idea of publishing this list from a friend who shared her list with me. I hope that others will do the same and we’ll all have lots ... Read more