Mentoring
I work with a small number of writers each year on memoir, hybrid nonfiction, and formally experimental narrative. This is not general writing advice. It is careful, sustained work over time, focused on the development of a manuscript from its earliest stages through to a coherent whole.
Mentoring is for writers who are working on something substantial — a memoir, an autofiction project, a fragmented narrative that resists the conventions of traditional structure — and who want rigorous, committed feedback from someone who has spent a long time thinking about how these forms work and why they matter.
What the work involves:
- Structural design and long-form architecture
- Coherence within fragmentation
- Shaping memory into narrative form
- Integrating critical thought with lived experience
- Sustained manuscript development
My approach draws on my doctoral research in experimental life writing and the photo-sketching methodology I developed, as well as years of teaching creative writing and literature at university level. I bring the same theoretical depth to mentoring that I bring to my own writing, but the emphasis is always on the practical question: how do you make this piece of work do what you need it to do?
I take on a limited number of writers at any given time. This is a high-trust, high-attention arrangement — not a course, not a workshop, and not a drop-in service.
If you are developing a memoir, autofiction project, or formally experimental narrative and would like detailed, committed feedback, please get in touch.
→ For weekly essays on life writing craft, see Written from Life