Podcast: Writing Hard Things & About Other People with Callie Feyen
One of the questions asked most by members in Exhale (and honestly, among our team as well) is how do we write hard things—especially when they involve other people. We invited Callie Feyen back on the podcast today to chat about how she does it, since we all agree that she writes hard things and stories with her daughters in them quite well.
Callie is a regular contributor to Coffee + Crumbs and T.S. Poetry Press, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, and blogs at calliefeyen.com. Her most recent book, Twirl: My Life with Stories, Writing & Clothes, released in February of 2019, and she’s hard at work on her third. A former middle-school English teacher and Literary Specialist, Callie is currently focusing on writing full-time, which luckily for us includes still teaching courses through Exhale! You can read all of Callie’s C+C essays here, connect with her on Instagram and Twitter, or find more of her writing at www.calliefeyen.com.
Resources We Shared:
Callie does freewrites to help her warm up. She often uses journal prompts like these free ones from Christie Zimmer.
As Callie’s girls grow, she’s having to learn to let go of the parts of the stories that are theirs to tell. She’s been exploring this more and more as her oldest, Hadley, turned 13 in November. A recent essay for C+C explores that.
If you’d like a resource to help you dive into the different types of essays, Callie recommends Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola.
Callie also challenges us to try writing from a different perspective: 2nd or 3rd person, instead of our usual 1st person narrative. She does this herself in her essay “The Samaritan Woman and Dirty Magazines” which originally published at Off the Page.
In our interview, Callie mentioned an essay where she talks about a friend coming over with her daughter and seeming to have a compulsive need to clean up behind her young child’s every move. Callie, not a mom at the time, didn’t get it. But she does now!
When she’s stuck on an essay, Callie often turns to poetry. She highly recommends both Melissa Reeser Poulin’s collection Rupture, Light, as well as Astonishments by Anna Kamienska.
Callie’s Prompt for You:
“When I am writing something that I think is going to be awfully difficult to render on the page, I set a timer for 20-30 minutes, and I write everything I can with no worry for craft. I literally vent on the page. I let myself feel everything I want to feel: anger, sadness, fear… whatever. When the time is up, I go back and take a highlighter and look for what else is there besides those tough emotions. Sometimes it happens to be a turn of phrase that maybe didn’t make the sadness go away, but it made it bearable. I look for those slants of light, and move to crafting something from there.” — Callie
Callie’s Submission Opportunity:
Callie loves looking through the calls for submissions at The Review Review. It's an online magazine that has interesting publication info and new. She also likes The Write Life for the same reason.
Callie’s Quote to Share with You:
From one of her favorite books, Joy In the Morning by Betty Smith:
“I guess she’s all right, he thought, or she wouldn’t be writing… . Nothing will ever throw her — no matter what happens to her — if she can get it down on paper.”
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