Dear Writers: Welcome to my new blog! My double blog.
My Writing in Upheaval blog series will address exactly that: this work of writing, its practice and context, and the underlying issues of craft that times of great upheaval…bring forward.
Interspersed among these postings will be practical discussions of craft, each entry focused on one point of writing craft and practice, in the Juicy Craft Points for Creative Writers blog series.
Some of the first Upheaval postings address, in part, the work of regaining “focus” in our writing, which many people tell me they “lost” when the pandemic hit. But my discussion of focus may not be what you might expect. There are no, “Buckle down,” “Buck up,” orders; not even the simple, and in ways limiting, and in ways harmful, direction to: “Keep your focus!”
Instead, I offer a discussion of writing practice and craft that I want to make more truthful, more expansive, more responsive to upheaval at-large and upheaval within; responsive as well to the excluded, constant tension and upheaval so many communities and individuals have long experienced.
And the entries on Craft Points will open useful and liberating perspectives on your day-to-day practice of writing, and your always developing creative craft.
Both can be something useful to reach for, when writing seems to have lost its purpose, and when writers feel they have lost that entry into the work and joy of writing, and the discoveries within it.
Here’s to our writing.
Anya Achtenberg