Catherine is a writer and journalist who has contributed to many media outlets, including Slate, Quartz, CNBC and NBC News. She is a frequent podcast and radio guest, with appearances on NPR and Lifehacker’s Upgrade. Catherine currently lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and baby son. Today we’ll be discussing her first book, Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru, which came out this past September.

In this episode Catherine Baab-Muguira and I discuss:

• How Edgar Allan Poe unexpectedly inspired her to write a book about mental health.
• Why she keeps her day job and how it helps her avoid literary snobbery.
• The value of learning to write good copy and the art of marketing your book.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Catherine Baab-Muguira

Catherine Baab-Muguira is a writer and journalist who has contributed to, among others, Slate, Quartz, CNBC and NBC News. A frequent podcast and radio guest, with appearances on NPR and Lifehacker’s Upgrade, she lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and baby son. Her first book, Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru, came out from Running Press/Hachette in September 2021.

You can find Catherine on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Check out the Substack post Catherine wrote about the long, long journey to a book deal, and what her P&L statement looks like.

Poe for Your Problems

Of all the writers anywhere, Poe might be the least likely person you’d ever turn to for advice. His life was a complete dumpster fire: he married his cousin; got fired from one job after another; constantly feuded with friends and rivals; and he was always broke. But that’s also precisely the point. Though Poe failed again and again, he also persevered.

Drawing deeply on his works and life, Catherine Baab-Muguira takes the familiar image of Poe in a new and surprising direction in this darkly inspiring self-help book. Despite what you might think, Edgar Allan Poe is the perfect person to teach you to say “Nevermore, problems!” and show you how to use all the terrible situations, tough breaks, bad luck, and even your darkest emotions in novel and creative ways to make a name for yourself and carve out your own unique, notorious place in the world.

An inspirational tale for black sheep everywhere, Poe for Your Problems will teach you how to overcome life’s biggest challenges to succeed at work, love, and art—despite the odds and no matter your flaws.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 383

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In this episode, we mentioned a summit, which is now over. It will be housed in the DIY MFA Members HUB. To get on the waiting list for the HUB, click here.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 383: The Mashup as a Model: Lessons for Your Writing Career from Edgar Allan Poe – Interview with Catherine Baab-Muguira appeared first on DIY MFA.

Every failure, every good circumstance turned sour, every unmet expectation or unfulfilled dream is another opportunity to get to know ourselves better. Our thoughts and actions, how we react to others and even how we treat ourselves is integral to our creativity and our writing.

In the nearly four years that followed after that first session, I dedicated time every week both with and without my therapist to parse through who I was and who I was becoming. During that time I felt my imagination open up in ways I never knew possible because of how well I was learning to understand me and my motivations, which in turn helped me better understand others and theirs. As a result of that learning and knowing, I was inspired to:

Write Fuller Characters

When I’m nervous or anxious about something, I tend to hold my breath. My therapist had to keep reminding me to breathe whenever I spoke about something that made me uncomfortable or vulnerable. I also speak very quickly when I fear judgement from others, so sometimes I run through things as fast as possible to get them over with.

These quirks continued to pop up as time went on and eventually, I began to observe similar behaviors in my friends and family, and how they interacted with each other and themselves. Some of my characters now hold a few of these traits, which gives them a depth they’d always been missing. The main character of my novel, for example, holds her breath when she’s anxious and runs when she’s emotionally overwhelmed.

Creative exercise: Pay attention to how you interact with others and yourself. Make note of your body position, if there are phrases you repeat again and again. And be sure to pay attention to others’ interactions, as well. These small signatures in language and body can help inspire how you write characters in stories, and how they respond to others and the circumstances they’re in. Engaging in this learning will help deepen your characters on the page because they’ll hold a shared human experience with your readers.

Tell More Detailed Stories

As a storyteller, having a captive audience of one for a full hour every week was everything to me. I got to tell my therapist the stories I wanted to tell, in my own way, from my own perspective. The issue, however, was that I usually gave my therapist the “big picture.” I spun a good yarn, but the finer more substantive details were things I’d leave out. Though a lot of that had to do with my lack of self-confidence, it was also an issue of keeping those details all to myself because I either assumed they were obvious or I thought they weren’t worth noting. But once I started adding in those details, my stories on the page and to my therapist drew richer pictures and held more meaning.

Creative exercise: Try picking up on the tiniest of details wherever you go, from the location to the people to the general mood. Each note can help inspire unique details for your stories that give audiences one-of-a-kind insight into how both you and your characters think, and what is most important. Additionally, these small observations can be fodder for building upon older worlds in your stories and creating new ones.

Learn the Ultimate Why

One of my most stark memories during those nearly four years in therapy was a moment in time where I was easily irritated by my best friend. Any and everything she did, I found something to complain about or feel agitated by, even when her behaviors weren’t directed at me. It wasn’t until a few weeks after it started happening that, on my own, I was able to parse through why.

She was confident, beautiful and beloved, all things I couldn’t see or refused to believe were true about myself. So, anything she did was irksome. But once I discovered why I was responding that way, it helped me understand my feelings weren’t about her. They were about me. That period’s now long behind us, but because of it I gained an invaluable creative tool for my stories.

Creative exercise: Try thinking about your own ultimate whys. Why do you really talk to a certain person? Why do you eat foods you don’t like? Why do you feel hurt more than you think you should? Everytime you answer a question, challenge yourself to go a little bit deeper. Write one more sentence, like someone is asking you to tell them more, then write another one. Keep going until there’s nothing left to say. Then try the same thing with your characters’ thoughts and actions. Doing this can help inspire not only their ultimate whys, but also your story’s, and deepen a reader’s connection to your work.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, that first break up was perhaps one of the best things that could’ve happened to me. It was the catalyst to beginning the process of self-examination and pulling apart 20-something years worth of brokenness while more fully understanding what it means to be human.

Knowing and learning about yourself is one of the best and most important things you can do for the sake of your own health and the health of those around you, but also for the health of your imagination and creativity. Because when you know yourself, you’re more open to being inspired by the relatable and empathetic characters in your own life, and can create stories on the page that truly resonate.

Jenn Walton is a writer, editor and storyteller based in Washington, D.C., whose fiction works are housed mainly in the speculative genre. She is currently working on her first novel project that explores, through the lens of a failing utopia, what happens when society gives in to its fear of the other. She previously wrote for a communications firm where she drafted and edited sponsored and organic content for top-tier academic institutions, Fortune 500 companies and leading philanthropic organizations that has run in The Washington Post, USA Today and the Atlantic. For more from Jenn, please visit her at her website or on Twitter.

The post The Importance of Knowing You appeared first on DIY MFA.

To prepare, I covered a triptych with click-bait style posters proclaiming “Three Reasons It’s Great to Be a Writer!” “Five Things About Writers That May Surprise You” and “Seven Steps To Writing And Publishing A Story.” I planned an activity that involved each small group coming up with a story idea and figuring out how to get through the planning and drafting stages to the point of writing a query letter. I brought props with me: a box of interesting trinkets for story kernels, magazines and literary journals where I’ve been published, the plaque I got for winning first prize in an essay contest last year (kids love awards!), and a copy of the DIY MFA book so I could talk about my column on this website.

But there was one thing holding me back when I was preparing to reveal my secret writing identity: I couldn’t let the students know that I’ve never felt less like a writer.

You Are What You Call Yourself

I’m a big believer in titles. If you love to run, you can call yourself a runner even before your first 5K. If you practice piano regularly, you can call yourself a pianist even if you’ve never given a recital. I’ve been a writer ever since I started writing for myself– not just for school assignments, but my own journal entries and short stories. Even before I was published, I felt it was important to own that identity. Now that I have been published, my work has been acknowledged and I even have a literary agent (though no book deals yet) I can’t even win the argument with my self-doubt: I am a writer, the same way I’m a teacher, a mom, a daughter, a wife.

But just because I call myself something doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes feel like a charlatan or even a failure in that role. I’ve been getting very little on the page lately, and haven’t felt inspired in weeks. It’s easy to identify the cause of this identity crisis: I have too many other identities, none of them secret. I’m a full-time teacher and a mom of two little ones. Those two jobs take up almost all my waking hours. Writing gets crammed into the margins, before my kids wake up, during lunch breaks and occasional weekend binges. As a result, my writing time doesn’t satisfy me; my creativity is frustrated. It’s becoming a smaller piece of my overall identity simply because the time I spend on it has been squeezed out of my other, more demanding identities.

Identity Is Fluid

That morning at the career fair, I feared that my identity crisis would come through to the students. I watched as my first group approached the booth and sat down on the floor, looking up at me expectantly, ready to learn what it was like to be a Writer. I began to speak– hesitantly at first– about my experiences with writing and publishing. And as I did, a part of me observed that my speech was passionate and that I was wholly engaged in the conversation. I noticed that the kids’ eyes were lit and their expressions attentive. I realized that I was finding the words to talk about myself as a writer, and as I found the words, I began to strengthen my identity again. It was clear, to myself and to the students, that I loved being a writer, even if my relationship with it was currently strained.

From that experience, I learned that it’s okay to not feel secure in my writing identity all of the time. It’s funny to think that I’ve taken breaks from my other identities without it feeling like a crisis– why does it seem like the stakes are higher with my writing self? I stop teaching every summer, but don’t feel like less of a teacher. I take an afternoon off from my kids to release the yoke of parenting, but that doesn’t make me stop being a mom. There’s an easy analogy that’s often made about wearing different hats to represent your different identities, but identity doesn’t work like that. It’s not a fixed object; it’s fluid, like shifting colors of sand.

I’m still in a bit of a writing slump, but I’m no longer assigning it a deeper meaning. Just because I’m not writing well doesn’t mean I have to question my identity as a writer. I’m a writer because that’s the way I create things and process the world. That’s not something that can be thrown away as easily as taking off a hat.

Have you ever questioned your writing identity?

Leanne Sowul is a writer and teacher from the Hudson Valley region of New York. She’s the curator of the website Words From The Sowul and authors the “Be Well, Write Well” column for DIY MFA. She writes historical fiction and memoir; her work is represented by Suzie Townsend at New Leaf Literary Agency. Connect with her at leannesowul(at)gmail(dot)com, at Facebook.com/sowulwords, or on Twitter @sowulwords.

The post How Secure Are You In Your Writing Identity? appeared first on DIY MFA.