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​Friday Inspiration 557

AS OF THIS MORNING: We re-opened registration for my How To Tell One Story online writing workshop. It’s a six-week email course that 250+ people have now taken, and that has led to some wonderful stories being written. There are only 25 total spots available, and the course won’t be offered again until Spring 2027. Here’s the link for more info + registration.​

AND: I am excited to announce a BRAND-NEW online course called Demystifying Publication. I have been trying to get my writing published for 20+ years now, through every possible means, in an ecosystem that changes every year, and this course is a distillation of all that experience and learning. We talk about the nuts and bolts of pitching freelance stories and self-publishing your writing on platforms like Substack, the challenges of both, and reasons why one or the other is not necessarily the “best” option for every situation. It’s a five-week email course, and we have 25 spots available. Here’s the link for more info + registration.​

(I’m also doing a livestream presentation called “There’s More Than One Way To Be A Writer” on October 13—details for that at the bottom)

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This is a fantastic idea for a fundraiser for a suicide prevention nonprofit, and also some great footage of some Prius stunts (video)

One Of The Best Things About The Internet This Week, Volume 2,537, is that you can spend a few seconds of minutes scrolling through oddly soothing photos of control panels, a collection that exists on Flickr because some people decided it should.

I invited my friend Peter Bromka on the My Favorite Things podcast this week, and I am happy to report that in addition to being a writer, running coach, very fast marathon runner, dad, and husband, he also owns a very large slab of basalt, which is the first of his five “favorite things” that we talked about (the others being the book Once a Runner, running at sunrise, The Belting Bronco, and baking cookies).

(Peter also recently wrote this great piece about his son, Will, starting to run competitively, and the complicated feelings he had as a dad who’s been a runner for four decades.)

I just want to say that it’s the 25th anniversary of Zoolander, and The Atlantic is writing about it, and it feels like justice that the movie was basically panned by critics when it came out, but so many people actually loved it that 25 years later, it’s getting a proper cultural critique. And maybe that in itself is a sort of commentary about art? [GIFT LINK]

I’m a sucker for a good “RIP my favorite diner” story, because the best stories about restaurants are about people, and this one DELIVERED with the scene at the end, and then the poem following the essay (and the line “does this count as writing”!).

​This short video about appreciating things like sewer covers, and about gratitude vs. appreciation is a promotion for a new book that’s coming out in November, and I have never put something in my shopping cart so fast. (Here’s the book if you’re also so moved)

This list of “16 Things That are Probably Insane but Make Perfect Sense” just kept getting better and better until I damn near shouted and applauded at #15, “There’s a Right and Wrong Side to a Tortilla.” Bravo.

WEBINAR DETAILS:

I’ve done so much brain-dumping of information to create my writing courses, which means a fair bit of looking back and considering what worked and what didn’t. Which led to the idea of livestreaming a presentation called “There’s More Than One Way To Be A Writer” at 6:00 p.m. MST on October 13. I’ll be talking about how my career as a writer started, some big turning points, and how I've evolved to make it work over the 20+ years I've been doing it. I'll also talk a little bit about my online writing workshops, and do a Q&A session afterward. If you’d like to join, sign up here and I’ll send you the link and a reminder the day of the livestream. (And if you can’t make it on the 13th, sign up anyway and I’ll send you the link to watch the livestream after it’s recorded)

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Books I’m Currently Reading:

• ​Brooklyn Antediluvian by Patrick Rosal

I am 99 percent certain I heard of Patrick Rosal somehow through Ross Gay, who was so enthusiastic about Patrick Rosal's poetry that I bought this book of poems, which won the Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize in 2017. It is much different than the last poetry book I had in this section (Andrea Gibson's Lord of the Butterflies), but gritty, powerful, and imaginative, and I'm really enjoying it.

• ​The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

I had only heard of Alison Bechdel through her fame as the namesake of the Bechdel Test, the pass/fail test for representation of women in fiction and films, in which a work has to feature two or more women having at least one conversation about something other than men. And then Zoë, my co-host on The Trailhead, mentioned this graphic novel about Bechdel's lifelong obsession with fitness and movement, so I bought it. I've just started it and I'm really into it.

• ​Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Hilary was reading this for months and absolutely gushing over it, and there’s only so much you can hear about one book before you just say “I’ll go ahead and borrow that whenever you’re finished.” And I am happy to say it’s as good as she said it was (although I would be terrified of taking on the challenge of writing about five different [famous] artists all in the same book like Mary Gabriel did).

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