Welcome to our last instalment of this string of episodes on writing with limitations and disabilities. I’m so happy to end this with the wonderful Cicely Belle Blain, the final member of my writing community who kindly agreed to join us to discuss limitations and disabilities when it comes to writing. Reading from Cicely’s bio: Cicely Belle Blain is a Black/mixed, queer femme activist, equity and inclusion consultant, and writer. Their bestselling poetry collection Burning Sugar was called “an intimately powerful debut” by Quill and Quire. With laughter and fearlessness, they harness a passi ..read more

Welcome to our semi-final instalment of this string of episodes on writing with limitations and disabilities. In this episode, writer S.L. Shuter, a member of my Writerly Love Community, talks about embracing an identity related to her diagnosis and the push back she received for this. Set L. Shuter is a writer, filmmaker and storyteller from Toronto. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The University of King's College and is currently querying her horror-comedy medical memoir, Ovaries Gone Wild. Her essays have appeared in The Toronto Star, Chatelaine Magazine, U ..read more

Welcome to the fourth instalment of this string of episodes on writing with limitations and disabilities. In this episode, Crystal Randall Barnett, a member of my Writerly Love Community, adds to the conversations we’ve been having in this series of episodes on writing slowly and listening to your body. Crystal Randall Barnett is an emerging writer from Ontario. She has been published by The League of Canadian Poets and Blank Spaces and her first-place short story appeared in a 2023 fiction anthology from Chicken House Press. Her writing is physically impacted and creatively influenced by he ..read more

Welcome to the fourth instalment of this string of episodes on the theme of writing with limitations and disabilities. Andrea Martineau is a writer, poet, bibliophile, and phytomaniac (I had to look that one up: a plant lover!) with a penchant for heritage buildings and their paranormal tenants. Her poetry has previously been published and shared in untethered magazine, Blank Spaces, [SPACE], Figroot Press, and The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause. Andrea is a wonderful part of our membership community, has such clarity around her practice and finds ways to work with her limitations. S ..read more

Welcome to my next conversation in this run of episodes on writing with disabilities and limitations. In this episode, I sit down with Amy Yuki Vickers, a new writer in our community and a recent alum of my Lit Mag Love course. Amy is the author of the blog and newsletter The Intentional Hulk, writes short stories and personal essays, and is at work on a memoir. And, as she says in her bio, because she’s autistic, she see-saws between intense occupation and recovery. This is just one subject we discuss in our conversation. She shares her experiences as a writer and how she has set up her wri ..read more

The Write, Publish, Shine Intensive, which brings together my three courses: Write and Light, a course to get writers generating new, more profound work; Revision Love, my course on learning to self-edit your writing; and Lit Mag Love, my flagship course on getting published in literary journals. All of the resources mentioned in the episode are in the show notes at rachelthompson.co/podcast/79 Learn more and sign up for the Write, Publish, Shine Intensive at rachelthompson.co/intensive Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information ..read more

In this episode, I sit down with our Community Facilitator, Meli Walker, to discuss what we do to make our online course community more accessible to writers with disabilities and limitations. This episode marks the beginning of a run of episodes focusing on writing with limitations/disability. Coming up, you’ll hear me talk with writers with various challenges about what they need to write, how they get their needs met, and what it’s like to write when you have barriers in your own body’s ability and barriers that exist in our writing community. My hope is that this series helps writers fin ..read more

“Nothing has to happen in the story. There doesn't need to be explosions or big shocking twists. It's just enough to have well-developed characters and a beautiful world.” —Terese Mason Pierre, Augur Terese Mason Pierre is co-Editor-in-Chief of Augur, a Canadian speculative literature journal, and has published work in Hobart, The Puritan, Quill and Quire, and Strange Horizons. Her work has been nominated for the Rhysling Award and Best of the Net. She talks about how Canadian literature in general is just a little bit softer than other kinds of literature, and how she brings forward the car ..read more

Lina Lau, writer, mother, and owner of too many notebooks, has published short memoir in X-R-A-Y, Prairie Fire, Hippocampus (where she is now a reader as well), Carte Blanch, and Little Fiction/Big Truths. We talk about how flash memoir writing captures a moment, how Lina reads a 100-word story and brings us into the experience of writing it, and also about the characteristics required of memoirists. Flash memoir A Five-Day Mini Course in Short Creative Nonfiction FREE this month! rachelthompson.co/flash Show notes for this episode are up at rachelthompson.co/89 Hosted on Acast. See acast ..read more

All craft is political. It’s how we, as writers, resist injustices and dream up better worlds. So, listen to this conversation with the brilliant Kavita Das, and then take up your pen. Kavita Das really takes us on an intentional journey with her deep knowledge of social justice work. She challenges us to unpack our motivations for writing about an issue and to understand that “writing, irrespective of genre or outlet, is an act of political writing,” regardless of intention. Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues by Kavita Das, was published by Beacon Press in 2022. You can ..read more