Stephanie Vanderslice’s essays have been included in books and journals such as Creative Writing Studies, New Writing, Profession, Teaching Creative Writing and The Creative Writing Handbook. Her prose has also appeared in Mothers in All But Name, Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in their 40’s and many others. With Kelly Ritter, she edited Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in the Teaching of Creative Writing (Heinemann, 2007), and wrote Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates: A Resource and Guide, forthcoming from Fountainhead Press in 2011. Stephanie also blogs at wordamour.wordpress.com. She holds a BA from Connecticut College, an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and is associate professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Recommended reads include Nicole Krauss’sGreat House, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and Jesse Lee Kercheval’sThe Museum of Happiness.
Writer, teacher, administrator, and mom Stephanie Vanderslice explains why she decided to spend a week at the Dairy Hollow Writer’s Colony, and how the space, time, and setting helped her finish another draft of her novel.
After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.
I’m a college writing teacher. Creative writing, to be exact. And yes, sometimes it seems as if paper goods companies ought to be lining up with the textbook publishers to wine and dine us at our conferences–or at least paying for our tote bags. Because while there may be no crying in baseball, the writing classroom is a different story.
