Hey, I’m Rachel. I grew up in New York with a man who happened to be my father, and my father happened to be a writer. 

A journalist, specifically, which means the emotional life of our household was very much to do with deadlines and when will his editor call him back? There were big adventures, awards, and parties. There was also hurt and frustration and isolation.

What writing was for my dad was a portal, he said: a way to live many lives. As I studied and taught creative writing, began working as an editor, and continued in my own creative practice, I slowly started to think that maybe writing is not a thing, but a relationship. If it’s a portal, it’s a portal to yourself.

I can’t overstate the influence growing up in a family of writers and artists had on who I became–to be encouraged to prioritize creativity is miraculous in this world. And it set me up more than most people to think about the process of creating something just as much as the finished piece you hold in your hands. It was never a separate thing to me, and it was never a secret that writing was collaborative, or that the pain of creativity is deeply personal–our self-doubt, our conceptions of ourselves, the expectations we feel we need to meet all influence our process and what’s possible. Later I would learn how this pain is cultural as well–how our desires to create and write and say something can be shut down by normative beliefs and master narratives. I would learn how these beliefs get transmitted to us in our reading, our families, our school, and communities. I would learn to see evidence of these beliefs in what writers shared with me, and in the work they produced. 

I learned from the activist / scholar Robert Yagelski to see “writing as a way of being”—a position and perspective to hold in the world, a practice of engaging with the body, the community, and the earth. I later found this way of thinking and the means to it bolstered in the anti-structuralist, punk-rock world of narrative therapy. I developed my own foundational belief to serve as the inspiration for my practice and coaching, that writing is not only a way of being, writing is a way of becoming.

This “philosophy of writing” is always in motion, deepening and expanding, as I work with writers to develop their own. How do I think about writing, its purpose, and its participation in our lives? How do I participate in its life? How do I contribute to its life? What are the values carried in my voice? What ethics assist my process? What beliefs around writing, creativity, art, my potential, and my place in the world, do I need to examine and discard and revise and replace? 

We encounter and explore these questions as we work to meet your writing goals and improve your writing craft. If your relationship to writing is a lot like your relationship to yourself, I can tell you we find it in big thematic conversation and in individual word choices, in planning and in the placement of a comma. When we pay this close attention to what we think and feel and hear and choose, we’re working on this relationship to ourselves. And, 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 become 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?

I guess that’s enough to say for now. What else? I live in New York’s Hudson Valley with my two large dogs, Bird and Casper. I’ve lived in many places besides. I’ve kayaked in a bioluminescent bay at midnight. I’ve sang in bands and been arrested. I’ve wrestled with deep time on the banks of the Rio Grande. I have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. I’ve had year-long certification training in narrative therapy and continue my education in that field through group work. I am also a certified handler for the Good Dog Foundation of volunteer therapy dogs, but that rarely comes up in this work.

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.