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Rachel Spies Finds Her Book's Shape in a Grief Writing Workshop
by Writing Workshops Staff
An hour ago
“Since completing my MFA I have felt very lonely in the writing life, and this has really put some life back into me.”
Rachel McElroy Spies already had the credentials. A proud native Austinite, she earned her MFA from Texas State University, taught undergraduate writing and rhetoric there, and has placed her work in The Ocean State Review, Catapult, Nonfiction Magazine, The Porter House Review, and Literati. What she didn’t have, after years writing on eight acres in the Texas Hill Country, was momentum, or a circle of writers to share the work with along the way. As she put it: “Before taking the workshop, my writing life was stagnant, but now it’s gaining momentum.”
That turn began with a single class. This spring, Rachel enrolled in Paper, Memory, and Light: Writing Through Grief in Flash Nonfiction, the four-week generative Zoom workshop led by Mira Ptacin. It was her first class with us, and by her own account, it arrived at exactly the right moment. The premise is disarmingly simple: each week, the group reads a short piece that approaches its subject from an unexpected angle, then writes into prompts built to find a “side door” into the stories that feel too big to walk straight into.
Rachel came to the class carrying a book-length project she had been circling for years: the story of her family’s long road back after a devastating act of violence, and the way nature and the landscape of the Texas Hill Country have helped them learn to live again. She knew its emotional core, but not its shape, and, as so many writers do, she kept trying to pack everything into it at once.
What changed wasn’t a trick of craft so much as a moment of clarity.
“Really it was when Mira said just straight up, this is a book about the aftermath of a crime, and how you piece together a life,” Rachel recalled. “The simplicity/clarity/narrowing of purpose of the mission has actually been super freeing and has given me more ideas rather than fewer.” After years of wrestling with form, she finally had her direction.
The momentum showed up on the page almost immediately. “I consistently wrote 4-5 days a week since enrolling,” Rachel reported, the kind of steady practice that quietly turns a someday-project into a manuscript in motion. She credits the prompts, but also the accountability and, above all, the people.
“Loved my classmates! Everyone was so thoughtful, so kind, so generous,” she said. The workshop didn’t write the book for her; it gave her a room, a deadline, and a circle of readers, and that was enough to get her moving.
Ask Rachel what carries her through the hard days and she points to belief, and to a story she once heard the poet Ocean Vuong tell, about a writer who spent years in near-silence, listening to leaves and streams and absorbing the world before he wrote and wrote and wrote. Her distilled version: “Silence, noticing, absorption is fruitful.”
Her advice for anyone still hovering on the edge of signing up is far less patient: “Just do it! The worst that could happen is that you are in the same place you’re in now.”
This fall, Rachel heads to Writing Workshops Portland for a full week of immersive workshopping, proof that the spark lit in those four weeks is still catching. We can’t wait to read the book she’s finally found the shape of. In the meantime, you can follow along with her on Instagram at @rachelspies.
Your success story could be next. At WritingWorkshops.com, you’ll find a welcoming community of writers, expert instructors who are working authors themselves, and a long track record of students who arrive with an idea and leave with momentum — and sometimes a finished book. The only thing standing between you and your next chapter is the decision to begin.
