We are four DIY MFA Small-Group Book Coaching graduates who were partnered in the program in 2020, stayed together after our terms ended, and have turned into a tight, very effective writing support group. We love how we work together and would like to explore/share our experience with the Word Nerd community.
Brenda Rech
Brenda loves writing short fiction and is working on her first novel. 2023 is the third year of her monthly newsletter – Thru the Window.
All her life she wanted to be a veterinarian and took all the right science classes in high school. But, her favorite class was English 300. The teacher was a poet, who love Shakespeare, and gave funky, fun assignments for creative writing. She struggled through first-year university, her grades in organic chemistry were less than stellar, but her marks in Canadian Lit were awesome. It was suggested that she to pursue an English degree and be a teacher. She quit university.
Fast forward. She signed up for a snail-mail writing course and wrote on and off, mostly stories about pets that had crossed the rainbow bridge. She got married, had two children and ran a successful consulting business with her husband.
Fast forward again. During a monster house move she wrote a blog with photos to send to people who wanted to know how the relocation was going. She found a Canadian self-directed writing course and then signed up for their mentored course.
Fast forward some more. She found DIY MFA 101 run by the awesome Gabriela Pereria and her team. She finished the self-directed course DIY MFA 101, signed up for P2P, and completed two sessions of the Small Group Coaching. She is a loyal “Word Nerd.”
Find more info on her website, or check out her newsletter.
Janet Jones Bann
Janet Jones Bann is a retired nonprofit founder/director, former writing teacher, and former peace & homelessness activist whose experiences inform her fiction, poetry, and essays.
Her work has appeared in several small literary magazines, four newspapers, and one poetry anthology. A handful of poems were Honorable Mentions in Writers Digest annual contests. Her in-progress romance novel, Home at Last, is based on her civil-disobedience struggle to get a New Jersey mayor to reopen a homeless shelter. It finaled in some Romance Writers of America chapter contests.
She took part in the first two sessions of DIY MFA’s small-group book coaching program, where she finally finished the 2nd draft of her novel and met her three wonderful writing sisters with whom she is doing the A Discovery of Writers column. She is a freelance editor and an Author Accelerator book coach, certified in fiction. For more info, visit her website.
Facebook: janet.kay.jones
Twitter: @janetjonesbann
Instagram: @janet_jones_bann
Elizabeth Prior
Elizabeth Prior is a writer, mom, techno-geek, sci-fi lover, and movie nerd who believes there are too many things to learn in this life to ever be bored. Her current novel-in-progress, The Golden Echos of Atomic Bees, is set in the future where a young woman working in a dying field of tech gets caught up in a conspiracy involving nanotechnology. An android, who is also her best friend, helps her see that human connection is what she’ll need to save her friends and maybe even herself.
Soleah K. Sadge
Soleah K. Sadge is a contemporary fantasy author. She enjoys traveling to places tied to legends and folklore that she can use in her stories. She resides in the United States where she reads, writes, knits, and teaches. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in several publications, and her story “Hearts and Stitches” won the Grand Prize in Short Fiction Break‘s 2022 Spring Writing Contest.
For more information, visit Soleah’s website.
Instagram: @sksadge
