Tayari Jones "So, You Have A Problem With Men?"

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!, On writing.

Tayari Jones blog post, “So, You Have A Problem With Men?” is worth your time. It’s specifically about the struggle of the black woman writer between self and society, but also about the writer’s struggle in general between rules and expectations and what they need to write in spite of all that. The post prompts thinking about how the writer is influenced by her community/society. Perhaps this profound influence– sometimes destructive influence–is why so many writers seek isolation to get their best writing done. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez locked himself in a room and nearly chain-smoked himself to death to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Thoreau, of course, everyone knows about him and Walden Pond, where he went to live deliberately. The “liberate” in that word is key. This article is about liberating the self from the world in the act of writing, about writing freely.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

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.