Meet our new instructor, Cara Wall.
What’s your favorite book and why?
I like long, character driven novels I can sink into, like The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert and Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett.
What do you love about writing?
I love words, I love living inside the emotional lives of my characters, I love the hard, painstaking work of living half in and half out of my own life in order to be the scribe for a story.
What do you hate about writing?
I find it really hard to move from my daily life into the creative realm. The transition always feels deeply unsettling, and I resist it more often than not—even though I know writing is my life’s work and one of the most satisfying things I will ever do.
Talk about your writing process? Are you structured? Organic?
My writing process requires a lot of baked goods. I need comfort cakes or cookies to convince me to retreat from daily life to writing.Technically, I do years of freewriting, longhand, in spiral notebooks. I don’t think or write linearly—I jump around from character to character and scene to scene. Once I feel like I know every character’s full arc, I begin the nearly impossible (for me) process of weaving everything into an order other people might understand.
What are you working on now?
I am pretty far in to my second book. It’s about a painting that is left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the people who want to discover its history. I am
Hoping it will be out in late 2024 or 2025.
BY AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN It’s become a bit of a truism to point out that if a career has an “appreciation week” it’s a sign those employees are underpaid. After all–while I very much appreciated the anesthesiologist who administered the epidural I’d begun asking for the moment my water broke,
BY DEVON PIKE It’s so warm that I can’t remember what cold feels like when I start to pack the car and so I make mistakes, make myself late. I let the dog distract me. I consider planting the bulbs in the planters, but I get that one right, leave
