by Ellen Santasiero July 2026 Photo by Vanja Lazic I’ve been thinking about the present tense lately because I just finished reading Amy Lin’s Here, After, a grief memoir written in a series of present-tense vignettes. The book offers a way for certain memoirists to make a manuscript more of a page turner. “Certain memoirists?” you ask. “Which ones?” The ones who do not live a celebrity life, and the ones who do not have a cataclysmic external event to recount—a skirmish with a polar bear,...

by Mike Cooper | June 2026 When we talk about sharing our work with the world, we often think in terms of publishing. Another way to share, albeit potentially more frightening, is reading our work in public. There are enormous benefits to reading or speaking your work to a live audience. I tell all my students that your absolute best editing tool is to read your work out loud. We write as our heart beats and our breath rises and falls. When you read aloud, you’ll hear the phrasing, the...

Workshopping other writers’ creative work makes you a better writer. And it doesn't have to hurt to work.