wRite with me

You have always wanted to write and somehow not begun.  You have faithfully kept a journal for years and want to move out in your writing.  You are a writer who has found herself/himself blocked.  Consider working with me.  I teach long-distance - online and by phone.  Some of my students come to Flagstaff for two or three day intensives.
I invite you to explore your writing with me.  My Master's Degree is in counseling psychology which allows me to bring a deep approach to helping writers move into their work.  Your relationship with your writing echoes your relationship with your life. Please contact me at shebetsherlife@gmail.com for more information.  We base my fees on how you want to work.
Bio 2012, Mary Sojourner

I'm the author of two novels, Sisters of the Dream (1989) andGoing Through Ghosts; the short story collection, Delicate; essay collection,Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest; memoir, Solace: rituals of loss and desire and memoir/self-help guide, She Bets Her Life. She is an intermittent NPR commentator and the author of countless essays, columns and op eds for High Country News, Yoga Journal, Writers on the Range and dozens of other publications.  I teach writing - in private circles, one-on-one, at colleges and universities, writing conferences and book festivals.  I've learned both the limitations and possibilities of healing. Writing is the most powerful tool I've found for doing what is necessary to mend.

Psychology Today blog, She Bets Her Life: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/she-bets-her-life

Writing is as personal as desire – and often as fully uncontrollable.  Words have been my lifeline, road trip, volatile lover, relentless master - my instant transport out of where I did not want to be.  Most often when I write, I walk the edge of a blade (not unlike a lifeline) between intuition and discipline.  Without the first, the stories are dead on the page; without the second, my reader would be lured into lush and meaningless chaos.

I learned to write by reading.  My childhood was periodically terrifying.  There were two shelters:  books and the outdoors.  The library became my real home, the librarians my safe family.  I was the serious child who carried six books home when the library closed, and came back the next morning, every book read.  As long as there was a book to read, I could sleep peacefully. 

I never wanted to be anything but a writer – and the beloved of a hero in any of Andrew Lang’s collected fairy tales.  My mother gave me a book of Dorothy Parker’s poems when I was twelve.  A month later, I sent my first submission – a poem in the style of Dorothy Parker – to The New Yorker.  When the form rejection came, I tacked it on my bedroom wall.  It was proof.  I was a real writer.

Twenty years later, a woman friend gave me a journal.  In the intervening years I’d written little.  I’d pursued my second goal into not-beautiful chaos and raising three children as a divorced mom.   I put the journal aside. I was afraid I had nothing to write.  When the next hero turned out to be a toad, I opened it and wrote: I don’t know why I’m doing this.  An hour later I looked up from my writing.  It seemed my blood was ink, the pen an extension of my entire self.  I had begun my real work.  And, like Scheherezade, I had learned how to save my life.

Now, I write and teach writing – always on the edge of the blade.  There are at least four books stacked on the table next to my bed – Irish novels, short story collections, natural history, cop novels, David Malouf, Tana French, Louise Erdrich, James Lee Burke.  Each night I read.  Each night I learn more about my craft.  And I learn what I value in the writing of others: an image that turns my thinking sideways, characters I cannot bear to leave, dialogue that rings in my mind like a conversation overheard on a road trip, storylines that lure me on and on till it’s three a.m. and my eyes are blurred and I am forced to close the book.  Then I can sleep.