ARCHIVE FOR Colwill Brown
Books that Made You a Writer

In the "Books that Made You" series, we're taking a look at the books that made us who we are. This time, we asked you what book made you a writer. After scrutinizing our highly scientific social media poll, we present to you this non-exhaustive list of Grubbie-approved gateway reads.
Grub Instructor Britni de la Cretaz says Baseball Life Advice by Stacey May Fowles convinced her to dive into sports writing. “If she could write essays about her feelings and anxiety and domestic violence and tie it all back to baseball, so could I.”
Grubbie Anita Harkess …
July 13, 2018 | Colwill Brown
July Top Picks: Opportunities for Writers

The July 2018 edition of "Writing Life Essentials," a monthly hand-curated list of contests, grants, scholarships, submissions calls, and awards, with a focus on opportunities that are at least one of the following: local, free to apply, and/or committed to celebrating and supporting writers from historically marginalized communities
July 5, 2018 | Colwill Brown
Books that Made You a Reader

In the "Books that Made You" series, we're taking a look at the books that made us who we are. To kick off the series, we asked you what book made you a reader. After scrutinizing our highly scientific social media poll, we present to you this non-exhaustive list of Grubbie-approved gateway reads.
Because nobody can resist a listicle, we've listed the most popular titles in a crowd-pleasing top five countdown
June 12, 2018 | Colwill Brown
What Moby Dick Can Teach Us About Trump: Steve Almond's Bad Stories

"Dear Sugars" podcast host, New York Times columnist, bestselling author, and longtime grubbie Steve Almond fished himself from a pool of dread after the 2016 election by asking, What are the bad, fraudulent stories that got us here? The result was his latest work of nonfiction, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country? a book-length inquiry into the bad stories we tell ourselves as Americans and how we can use literature as a lens through which to understand what the hell happened in 2016. Earlier this year, Steve was on retreat at Wellspring House, where GrubWrites …
May 24, 2018 | Colwill Brown
Writing Rules Made to Be Broken: Never Look Back

There's a distinctly rebellious air about the Muse and the Marketplace Conference this year. This weekend at Boston's Park Plaza, #Muse18 presenters will be letting loose on the writing rules that have held our manuscripts hostage for far too long. To kick off the conversation ahead of the Muse weekend, this year's Muse series explores the writing, publishing, and workshop rules, conventions, and accepted norms that authors, agents, and editors at the Muse love to hate—and why they'd love to see them broken. Some presenters will also offer their own rules or conventions that they want to see adopted in writing and …