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.
The narrator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is familiar to me. He’s that boy who broke my heart. The cool one who could mold and shape ... Read more
What Liz wrote: Dry-mouth, her neck in a knot, she kicked her foot a little to the right to check. Was he still there? Shit. He was. She stretched her ... Read more
Every single year I write a New Year letter outlining my goals and desires for the coming year. You can be sure that this year, I have them. I have ... Read more
“Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story ... Read more
I tend to read with my head more than my heart. I like to see how ideas develop through story and how writers put words together in interesting ways. It’s ... Read more
Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays is a short novel whose protagonist, Maria, is so out of touch with her own feelings that she does not even feel them ... Read more
Only 40,000 words for me this year, but I’m happy with most of them.I’m back and planning to pay more attention to this neglected blog. I’m also combining my What ... Read more
This is my fourth year and going into the second week, I think I have the lowest word count ever. Do you think it’s a coincidence that it also might ... Read more
NY Times article on Google’s book scanning settlement. Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?Find free resources and information here.Some past posts ... Read more
Okay, so Fight Scenes by Greg Bottoms was not my favorite book. I’m not quite sure if I can even explain it, but I think ultimately it comes down to ... Read more