November 2022 Wrap Up
Howdy!
Another month flew by; it seems like time speeds up as the days get shorter and the nights get longer. I always attributed this phenomenon to the way that the school year accelerates between September and Christmas in a desperate attempt to herd kids toward learning before the derailing of break, but the phenomenon holds now even though I am not in the classroom this year.
For over fifteen years now, my Novembers have been caffeine-fueled mania and social faux pas as I scrambled to scribble 50,000 words as part of National Novel Writing Month. I took a little bit of a different tactic this month — a Rebel, in Nano parlance — and was able to bang out 50,000 words on a variety of projects and create something of a rhythm to my writing life. A longer deep dive into my takeaways from Nano is forthcoming.
The burden of 50,000 felt much lighter this year, thanks in no small part to a class I took at StoryStudio Chicago. A five-week course on memoir and personal essay taught by memoirist, novelist, and creative writing professor David Stuart MacLean, it was the first I’ve taken at StoryStudio, but definitely not the last. With no idea what to expect, I went in with an open mind. The class ended up being me, the professor, and eleven women, only a handful of us under age 40. Most were hobbyist writers trying to write their first substantial piece, but many…
