Finding Your People
A lesson on craft and marketing to build your author career
Welcome to my 100th post! Thanks so much for reading. I am grateful for YOU! The Rebel Author Newsletter is a twice-monthly publication about writing craft, book marketing, and finding your voice. And I’m Lynne Golodner, author of 11 books (as of this month!) and hundreds of essays and articles, a marketing expert, and the mom of four young adults.
Read my latest essay: A Walk in Budapest - and it’ll publish on the Consequence Forum website on January 20th.
On Craft…
Vermont was a dream…a hilly landscape furred with evergreens and a quiet inhabited by all manner of creatures, but not overrun with human noise. This was a long time ago, and I was young, so perhaps it wasn’t really like this, but I’m claiming my memories as true.
I went to Goddard College for my MFA, a low-residency program that was one of the only of its kind at the time. This was the 1990s, and I went to graduate school for creative writing on a lark. I couldn’t know then how much that MFA would mean to me now. I also couldn’t know how much I’d love teaching for I didn’t go to gain a teaching degree. I went to become more of the kind of writer I wanted to be, to become publishable, to work toward my goal of writing one good book.
My goal then was a book published by the time I was 30. It seemed a long way off, and not much more than a dream. Each semester, I slept in a dorm room with deeply feeling people. Walked trails in the cool morning, our footsteps the only human sound as we trudged deeper into the forest. Stayed up late talking in what felt like very important conversations. Wrote poems that represented my open pumping heart on the stark white page.
I felt so much then. I guess I still do. But that was my first exposure to other people who felt deeply, who wrote about it, who were not afraid to open their hearts in public. They wouldn’t poo-poo me for being serious or emotional or passionate.
Yes, the degree opened doors for me—I’ve taught at universities for nigh on 30 years. The program forced me to create a manuscript of poems as my master’s thesis, which I then submitted to a small press in Maryland, which accepted it and published my first paperback collection, Driving Off the Horizon, in time for graduation.
But more than that, I met my people. Chris, whose writing to this day still moves me to tears. Doug, whose belly-laughs lit up his face, and all of us sitting near him. Peg, whose farm I drove to in the Shenandoah foothills, to drink wine on the floor and read my poems aloud amid a group of writer-friends who came from all the compass directions to hear each other’s voices and fall into each other’s arms.
Many writers at midlife wonder if they should pursue an MFA. Do they need it to write well, to get published? Absolutely not. I did the MFA because I had time and resources and graduate school was something you did after college if you could afford it. I got lucky.
But now, at midlife (and let’s be honest, 53 is not midlife—will I really live until 106?), time is short. Do an MFA if you want to spend your time in that environment. If you can afford to soak it up, and linger with words, and meet other people equally focused on writing and craft and learning more.
You can learn and grow in so many other ways. There are shorter programs, classes (online, live, retreats), so many offerings that will help you fine-tune your craft and learn how to write well and introduce you to others writers like you (which is so important) but honestly, the best way to become a great writer is to write. A lot, often, and with the kind of support and encouragement that is like fertilizer on a garden. Oh, and read, too.
I pursued my MFA for me—a sense of accomplishment, to sharpen my writing voice, to learn craft—but it gave me so much more. I came alive there. Began to see who I needed to be. That it was even possible to be a writer, professionally. It was the start of my craft journey in creative writing, not the end, for I am still learning today—reading intensely to study what other writers do, taking classes, working with mentors.
And honestly, as I write this, I kind of wish I could go back. Be there again right now, with nothing else to focus on but writing. That sounds absolutely delicious.
With craft comes confidence. When you learn the why and the how, you have a name for things, and a structure. I’m still teaching, and every time I teach a writing class, I learn more about my own craft. Maybe I’m teaching so that I can become a better writer? I think maybe I can never learn enough to be done.
Questions For YOU
Where was the first place you came alive?
How can you bring experiences like that into your life today?
What will you need to do to be more aligned with who you are at the core?
What steps do you need to take to become the person you dream of being?
Finding Your People
When I created my marketing company in 2007, I called it Your People LLC, thinking it would be a snappy slogan to say, “We’ll help you find your people!” I mean, we do this, and always have, but I don’t think we ever used that slogan in our marketing!
But that’s the key to any kind of marketing: finding your people. Knowing who they are. And it’s something we must do personally as well as professionally.
My personal peeps have my back, no matter what I do. There’s Katie, whom I met in a poetry class at the YMCA. She’s known me through all my phases: secular overly feeling young Jew yearning for love, Orthodox married woman covering hair, elbows and knees, post-Orthodox divorcee single-parenting and looking for a better kind of love, fiercely Jewish & happily married a second time. Though she is Irish Catholic, I call her Rabbi Katie because she knows more about Judaism than many Jews, and is fiercely protective of my community. I am convinced that we have been friends for many lifetimes, and maybe she was the Jew and I the Catholic at different times.
There’s Alisa, who came to me as a marketing client a dozen years ago. We went with a group of women to Sedona once. It snowed in the foothills, big fat wet flakes that coated the ground. You could see a bit of green through the white, and the air had a bite. We were readying for a hike, and I looked at her and said, “You are so familiar to me.” She laughed, but she knew what I meant.
There are new friends, too—Carrie and Michelle and Elizabeth and several others who I fall into deep conversation with, can’t get enough time with, laugh and cry and share from my heart and feel like, where have these soul-sisters been all this time?
Do you have people like this? I hope so. They make all the difference.
With marketing, perhaps you’re not meeting your best friends, but your audience is a precious thing, and you have to treat it as valuable as it is. For me, marketing is all about relationships. Getting to know people, listening to their experience reading my words, writing with them in mind. Next week, my book tour continues and I can’t wait to meet new readers and be inspired by the way they’re touched by story.
Someone asked me the other day what I’d tell a new author about book marketing. I’d say, make it fun and be curious. An author career is a long journey; you can’t afford to take any one part of it too seriously. It all matters. And, none of it does. So have fun with it. Try new things. And find your people. They’re the ones who want to hear from you, read your words, buy your next book.
Book Tour Updates
I’m heading to Dallas in a week for four events. Come see me if you can!
January 9—Woman of Valor book talk & luncheon, Beth El Congregation, Fort Worth, Texas
January 11—Mining Your Life for Story class, The Writer’s Garret, Dallas
January 12—Jews in Scotland book talk, Congregation Beth Torah, Richardson, Texas
January 13—Lifesaver Luncheon keynote speaker, Dallas Texas
Forest Walk on a Friday
If you’ve been considering becoming a paid subscriber, NOW is the time! Through the end of January, every new paid subscriber who pays for the year-in-full will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book as part of their subscription!!! FOREST WALK ON A FRIDAY, a collection of personal essays, will be published on January 28th.
Join me on January 30th for the virtual launch. Register here.
You can also gift your writer-friends a paid yearly subscription to the Rebel Author Newsletter, and receive a copy of FOREST WALK for yourself: https://lynnegolodnerauthor.substack.com/giftafriend
Book Synopsis, FOREST WALK ON A FRIDAY:
Since she was six years old, Lynne (Cohn, Schreiber) Golodner has turned to writing to make sense of the world, figure out her feelings and process experiences. In this riveting, heart-spilling collection of personal essays, Lynne takes the reader on a journey with her through travel, religious exploration, parenting, relationships and intimate encounters with the natural world.
Forest Walk on a Friday contains 28 essays—20 of which have been previously published in literary journals and magazines—articulating the ache of lost love, embarking on a soul journey to find happiness alone on a mountaintop, making peace with the loss of a father and examining what work is.
The Detroit-based author of award-winning novels, poetry collections and nonfiction books, Lynne opens her heart to readers in a daring and brave way, inviting them to contemplate how humans find happiness and what makes life worth living. As with all of her books, Lynne shares the beauty of her Jewish identity and the ancestry she inherited, through food, visits with beloved relatives and quiet walks in the cemetery to visit those she’s lost.
She details her two marriages, showcasing the courage it took to leave one that didn’t work and sharing the gratitude she found in discovering new love at midlife. As a parent of four children, Lynne is candid about the joys and challenges of being an attentive parent and the emotions that come with letting go of her grown children as they prepare to leave home.
And Lynne writes about connecting with the earth, finding herself in the soil and on the river, and discovering the happiness of coming home to oneself. Readers will salivate over descriptions of oysters fresh from the ocean, just-picked strawberries staining mouths with their sweetness, blueberries bursting off the bush and the familiarity of a grandmother’s chicken soup, fragrant and flavorful.
Forest Walk on a Friday is an exquisite wander through one woman’s life, offering universal lessons about how to be happy with what you have, how to cherish the identity you inherit and how to be open to possibility as one walks through life.
Thanks for reading the Rebel Author Newsletter. I write this twice-monthly missive to share insights on writing and publishing and build a community of writers and readers. I so appreciate you. If you like what you read, please share with others who might find value in these words.