I wanted to be a writer from a really young age. Before I could read or write I used to dictate books to my parents (my first was “Poopy Ducky”) and by third grade was putting “writer” in response to those “what do you want to be when you grow up” questions.
I love the first moments with a new draft. In the best of times it feels like playing and even when it’s not going well, putting a piece aside or even starting over doesn’t feel as emotional as it does at later stages.
I often force myself to do the things I know I should do but easily neglect. It’s easy to feel like I have to be “productive” all the time, but when I teach writing I emphasize taking creative risks, doing strange prompts with seemingly no connection to something you’re already working on, making a radical change in style just to see what happens, and when I’m teaching I’m more easily reminded to take my own advice.
I’m reading Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which at first I loved because it so well captures the strange relationships that form in intense high school settings between and among teachers and students, but am now loving because it has totally surprised me from a structural standpoint.
I just recently listened to Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still and found so much of what she had to say about the process of making photographs to be very relevant to writing. At one point she’s describing the constant struggle between self-doubt and the desire to create. She writes: ““Maybe you’ve made something mediocre—there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets—but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.”
Madelin Parsley grew up in the panhandle of Nebraska. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Vanderbilt University, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Narrative Magazine. She’s currently working on a novel about five siblings, two small towns, and a family dynamic that is shaped and reshaped
Instructor Michael Belanger is an author and high school history teacher. His debut novel, The History of Jane Doe, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and received a Kirkus starred review. More recently, his writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Pigeon Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and the 2025 Connecticut Literary Anthology.
