I’m Rachel Jepsen, a writing coach and editor from New York. I live with my two large dogs, Casper and Bird, in the Hudson Valley. I work with people on their writing craft, process, and practice, and as we work we talk. We talk about how writing allows us to become more than we imagine ourselves to be, brings us in connection and relationship with others, and into a deep and lasting engagement with the world. As we gain confidence through writing craft, add rhythm and ritual to life through writing practice, and gain skills of perspective, patience, trust, and puzzling through writing process, we became better writers to our own standard, values, and story. My writers have taught me the most about how this work is also about being alive, more attentive, more appreciative, more living. We put down old stories and beliefs, learn what we care about, enter through relationships, and free our voices from creative blocks like self-doubt, self-denial, a sense of scarcity, and the pressures of conformity. We free the voice too as we decide where it is going—who do we write to, for, and why? What is their journey, and how does it link up with ours?

Many years ago I learned from Robert Yagelski to see “writing as a way of being.” Since that idea dug into my brain ten years ago, I’ve gotten an MFA in Creative Writing and continued my training and education in narrative therapy. I’ve been in intimate collaboration with dozens of diverse nonfiction writers as a coach and editor, for NYT bestselling authors, entrepreneur-essayists, and backyard poets. I have, or give, a lifetime too of my own creative work, which my writers teach me so much about every day. I’ve learned everything from the writers I have known and the depths, struggles, stories, and joys they have generously shared with me. Through all of this and wholly without intention, I’m working out something of a philosophy of writing, an idea I encourage you to consider through your own work and its participation in your life, and your contribution to the life of writing. We change writing in a process called revision, and that process changes us.

Writing is a way of becoming.

It helps to have some help with that.

If you want more of these ideas and maybe to engage with them together, read my newsletter You Are A Writer, visit my coaching and workshop pages, and reach out.