So, this post is going to be about self-care and how I do it as a writer. You may get some ideas from it and you may not. Self-care is critical for writers right now, and for everyone else. We live in . . .interesting times. The most important take-away is that I developed these self-care techniques by listening and paying attention to myself, especially to times when I felt more calm and relaxed, and by trying to do more of that. Here is what works for me. 

1. Very cozy bedding. My bed has been my oasis going back over 30 years. Someday I’ll write an essay about it. I work very hard to raise the comfort level of my bed and my bedroom. In fact, soon after the 2016 election, I went out and bought a duvet, probably the best purchase I’ve made since then. I always sleep on 200-250 thread count sheets in calming colors (usually white) that I’ve purchased on sale. I try to keep my bedroom uncluttered and calm–so that I can anticipate some respite most nights.  

2. Baking bread. I’ve also baked bread for about 29 years, a very simple recipe I listed on the blog years ago here. Baking bread is one of several things I’ve found to make with my hands that calms me down. It never feels like a chore. As soon as I get that floured dough in my hands and the smell of yeast, flour and sugar wafting through the house, I go into the zone. Bonus: the end result is delicious and fortifying. The key for me, however, is the process. I go through the exact same steps to bake my bread, from mixing the starter to cleaning up afterwards and this is a great comfort. The ritual is everything.

3. Exercise and yoga. I do yoga three days a week, with great thanks to Yoga with Adriene for the variety and convenience. Right now I’m walking our dogs twice a day with my husband  for a total of thirty to forty minutes walking–unfortunately kind of slowly because of all the sniffing, but it is what it is. We also have an exercise bike that I use to “complete the stress cycle,” as Emily and Amelia Nagoski suggest in their fantastic book Burnout: Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Honestly, this book was life changing for me. 

4. Hand-sewing, slow stitching and visible mending. I used to hand-sew a lot as a child–funky, oddly-stitched seventies-style projects. I’ve recently taken it up again, hand-stitching a few pillows for my backyard chairs, making gifts for friends and doing a lot of visible mending projects. Here’s the key for me–it’s very much about process not product.  If my stitches aren’t perfect-that’s not the point. The point is the rhythm of sewing and making something with my hands. Another practice I find comforting and calming. 

5. Sleep apps and Sleep Stories. These are a relatively new discovery but a game changing one that has gotten me through some rough times in the past few years, from the start of the pandemic, the death of my father, and my husband’s health crisis (more on that below). I find the sleep stories on Calm, Slumber and Sleep Cycle (I’m particularly partial to the train stories, like The Flying Scotsman, London to Edinburgh, which my friend Elisabeth turned me on to) to be useful not only in falling asleep but in staying asleep and improving the quality of my sleep. I fall asleep before the end of the story almost 100% of the time, which is the point.

What does all this have to do to writing? Well, it helps keep me in a headspace where I’m more likely to do it. But that leads me to #6.

6. Self care and writing. I’m working mainly on a textbook for teaching creative writing right now, as well as a memoir and blog posts like this. I was working on my second novel but that is on a hiatus for the moment. But I’m trying to keep the bar low. I feel satisfied if I make daily progress on a book chapter (the goal is a chapter a week) or a part of the memoir or one of these blog posts. But my new mantra is really one thing, one day at a time. The focus is the textbook because I have a deadline for that (which I may need to push back a few weeks but that’s ok). The other stuff is just extra or lagniappe as we used to say, when we lived in Louisiana. It will all get done over the long term and if it doesn’t, then it wasn’t meant to be.

Full disclosure and update: I started this blog post during the first summer of the pandemic, when I was teaching. Most of the time I am teaching and directing an MFA program and that takes priority, since that’s my job and my students deserve it (although I write before I teach, before I do anything really, because I can’t write well if I’m worn out from the other stuff). But for almost three months, from mid-October to Mid-January 2021, I didn’t write at all because we had a family health crisis. My husband was and is recovering from a freak Sudden Cardiac Arrest and a medically induced coma that happened in mid-October. We both had to go on family leave in adjusting to an entirely new normal and I was and am doing a lot of caregiving, which I feel lucky to be doing because he almost died. In another strange stroke of luck, I happen to be on sabbatical this semester, devoting myself, work-wise pretty much to my textbook for teaching creative writing, a research trip for my next novel and promoting my debut novel, The Lost Son (preorder info and more here). In the fall, I’ll be back to teaching and making new adjustments, with new expectations. But I’ll still be making time for these 6 practices, because they’re critically important to me.

So, listen to yourself. In the swirling world that demands so much of you, pay attention to what brings you peace and sanity and do that. As much as you can.

So it’s been a bookish summer, everyone!  The tenth anniversary of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught came out from Bloomsbury in July and it is amazing.  I’m incredibly proud of it and I’m allowed to say that without worrying bragging because I only put it together with Rebecca Manery, most of the book is cutting edge research in creative writing pedagogy from the most current scholars in our field.  About half of the essays are re-envisionings of the original essays from the ground- breaking first edition from people like Tim Mayers, Anna Leahy, Kate Haake, Mary Ann Cain and so on.  How often do you get to read a book where the scholar gets to revisit what they wrote 10 years later?  Right, never.  So take this chance!  And still there’s more–the rest of the book is chock-a-block (as they would say in the UK) with new essays from even more of the most relevant scholars in our field, taking its pulse and predicting its future.    This book is a must have, creative writing  people, for your bookshelves and for your classrooms.  And of course, I’m biased, but Rebecca and I created it to be a must-have.  And Bloomsbury, with their vision, supported us every step along the way.

More movement on The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life: An Instructional Guide for Prose Writers.  Houston, we have a cover! And I love it:

I am so excited to bring forth this very personal guide to making a literary life, packed with lots of information on everything from making the time to write to getting published, finding an agent to giving yourself permission to write.  Writing geek’s unite! Click on the book itself to pre-order the Geek’s Guide from amazon.  Launching December 14, it will make a great holiday gift for all the creatives in your life.  Don’t forget to buy one for yourself.

I also continued working on a new, complete rewrite of Beautiful, Terrible Things which is proceeding well, albeit slowly and submitting The Lost Son to indie publishers and contests.  Let’s just say “Nevertheless, She Persisted” should be my tag line.  Anyway, a week ago, I found out that The Lost Son is part of the

Winners will be announced at the end of September but the press will be publishing lots of interviews and quotes with the short list winners in the meantime–keep your eye out for more news from me here, on Twitter and FB.  The competition is incredibly stiff–I’m happy to be among them–cross your fingers and toes and pray for me if you pray–I want nothing more than to get The Lost Son into reader’s hands.

More soon! Stephanie

Big news!  The 10th anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy is coming out from Bloomsbury and is now available for pre-order here.

We’ve been working on this for months and I can honestly say, this new edition is going to be amazing.  It’s twice the size of the original, with key essays revisited by their authors ten years on and a whole section of cutting-edge essays from new creative writing scholars.  Don’t miss it!

Less than a week ago I was working hard on an essay about writing and perseverance for my Huffington Post column.  About a difficult subject, an assault and kidnapping attempt I experienced twenty-five years ago when I started my MFA program, it was something I had tried to write about many times but failed.  The writing always seemed forced; not quite there.  I wasn’t ready.  

Last week, I felt ready and the essay just poured out.  You can read it here, at the Huffington Post, where it got a great response.  But I’d rather you read it here, over at  Easy Street mag.  My friend, writer Wendy Russ, asked if they could reprint the essay at the magazine she edits (she is actually Editor in Chief!) yesterday and I was honored to say yes.  It is a wonderful magazine of arts and culture, especially literary arts and culture.  I encourage you to check out all the great features, like it on Facebook and get yourself on the newsletter mailing list.  Read the “Apply” section if you want to get more involved in literary culture.  Read the “submit” section and consider submitting. Spread the news to all your friends; more people need to know about this awesome literary outlet!

This is a statue at the memorial of the tragedy. Many of the dead, mothers and children, washed ashore clutching each other.

One hundred and eleven years ago today, June 15, 1904, the steamship General Slocum set off in New York Harbor ferrying nearly fourteen hundred people, many of them parishioners of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s Little Germany, to a picnic on Long Island.  It was an annual celebration for St. Mark’s, a church cruise and picnic to mark the end of the school year and the beginning of summer.

Minutes into the cruise, tragedy struck.  A fire started in a storage room and spread quickly.  Because the ship had been inspected in name only for decades, none of the firefighting or lifesaving equipment worked.  Aged firehoses instantly sprung leaks and proved useless as flames swept through the decks.  Lifeboats that had been “painted” where they hung over the years were stuck to the boat and would not budge.  And the worst insult?  Passengers who grabbed cork-filled life preservers and thought they were jumping to their safety in the harbor (few city-dwellers could swim in those days) discovered the preservers were original to the boat and that the aged cork had turned to dust, dust that became as heavy as stone when it hit the water.

An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 aboard the boat that day died; the second largest loss of life in New York City after 9/11.  Since the outing was on a Wednesday, many of these were women and children; the men of the family still heading off to work.  By mid-day, many of them would discover their entire families were gone.  Some committed suicide that very day or in the weeks to follow; others never recovered mentally.  Many did, somehow picking up the pieces of their shattered lives.  

I became interested in the tragedy when my mother started telling me that it was one of the reasons Astoria, Queens started to grow in the early 1900’s.  Many of the men in Little Germany moved across the river to Astoria to start over.  Astoria was near Hell Gate where the ship went down but it wasn’t full of the memories of where they had lived with their families.  In fact, many said they simply couldn’t bear to live in Little Germany any longer, in a place suddenly so absent of women and children.  

I have always been familiar with Astoria as a part of the Queens borough I spent a lot of time in growing up.  But I became fascinated by the fact that a place could grow and flourish as a result of such a tragedy.  I decided I wanted to write a multigenerational novel that began there, that started with one man, Augustus Horstmann, a watch maker, somehow starting over after losing his wife, mother, sister and young son in the wreck, and followed him and then his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren through the rest of the twentieth century.  None of them, of course, are immune to loss, just as none of us are.

Titled The Gift, the novel focuses on the stories of three characters, Augustus, his daughter Anna and Anna’s great-grandson-in-law, Nicholas, and three periods of time, 1914-16, 1946 and 2001-2004.  It’s with my agent now.

You can watch an excellent documentary on the Slocum tragedy here (make sure you have time or watch in bits; it’s almost 45 minutes long); featuring recreated scenes,  interviews with historians and survivors and present-day footage of where the steamship went down.

I’m so excited to debut my new website, www.stephanievanderslice.com.  Check it out and have a look around.  There’s an about page and a page where you can find out about my latest books.  There’s also a resources section (under the writing section) where you can find out about more about writing if that’s what you’re interested in, and you can even find a recipe for egg creams–I reference them a lot in my novels.  And my blog has migrated there to0, so now Stephanie Vanderslice is all in one place!!

The best part is that the really feels like me.  Want to know how it all happened?  I had already started to feel like I needed to re-invigorate my web presence when writer Cara Brookins came to speak at the University of Central Arkansas about her career and the role that social media plays in it.  While she spoke she mentioned that she and her family were starting a social media consulting company, MySocialFam, designed to help people understand and build their web following. They could even create a website for me.  

Flashforward two months later to a meeting with Cara and her two lovely daughters, Hope and Jada, who do the heavy lifting on the website design, at Mylo coffee in Little Rock.  I felt that they were really listening to me and “getting” who I was as a person and as a writer.  After that and some more listening and emailing back and forth, www.stephanievanderslice.com was born.  I could not be happier with it.

Best of all, I feel ready to take the reins now because they have helped me every step of the way.  I cannot recommend MySocialFam enough.  And they did not pay me to say this. They didn’t even know I was going to write it!

One of the things we forget when we get all wrapped up in the ins and outs of our writing lives is what writing itself boils down to: having something to say.  I wrote about that on my most recent Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life column on the Huffington Post here.

I recently had the opportunity to see writing guru Anne Lamott speak at an event in Little Rock and write about it on the Huffington Post.  She even signed my well-loved first-edition paperback of Bird-by-Bird.  Read about it here.