by Writing Workshops Staff
8 hours ago
Shelby Hinte grew up in a working-class family and spent most of her adult life working two or three jobs at once. So when a writing teacher compared the creative practice to clocking into a shift at a store, something came together for her. "I know how to work," she says. "I've been clocking into jobs most of my life. It suddenly made writing so much less elusive." That clarity animates everything about her approach to personal narrative: steady, grounded, and genuinely energized by what happens when writers stop waiting for truth to arrive and start building the conditions for it.
In her upcoming online workshop, Toying with The Truth: A Generative Nonfiction Workshop, Shelby invites writers to interrogate how personal stories get made. Drawing on readings from Melissa Febos to Zadie Smith, the course treats memoir not as confession but as construction. Students will write across a range of creative nonfiction forms, workshop shorter pieces in community, and leave the nine-week Zoom course with a polished second draft in hand. At WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, this is exactly the kind of course we love to offer: one that changes not just what you write, but how you think about writing altogether.
Shelby brings the credentials to match. She is Associate Editor of Write or Die Magazine and the author of the debut novel Howling Women (LEFTOVER Books, 2025), with work published in BOMB, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, and more. In this workshop, expect to generate substantial raw material, receive and give meaningful feedback, and discover something new about your own creative process along the way.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Shelby:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Shelby. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Shelby Hinte: Hey, I'm Shelby and I am a writer, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. I'm the Associate Editor at Write or Die Magazine where I oversee essays and author interviews. I've taught Creative Writing in a lot of places including online, in jails, at probation departments, and in public schools. I'm also an avid runner which I think tracks with my fundamental personality trait being that I like doing anything that requires a significant amount of solitude and suffering with the lure of transcendence somewhere just within reach (supposedly).
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Shelby Hinte: I've been interested in the idea of truth/fiction for a long time and what it means to get to the truth of something. Years ago I read The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr where she writes about the absurdity of believing in objective truth. She uses the example of telling stories around the dinner table with family, and in the anecdote she notes that disagreements around the so-called facts usually ensue. She notes that once a writer chooses to tell one detail and not another, the event itself becomes a story, and stories are constructs. As an artist, I find this idea really exciting because it means there are an infinite number of ways to tell the same story, and each iteration drives towards some specific truth—maybe even a revelation. In this class I'm excited to encourage writers to take narrative chances as a means of revealing something to themselves both as writers and as individuals.
"Once a writer chooses to tell one detail and not another, the event itself becomes a story, and stories are constructs."
Writing Workshops: Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
Shelby Hinte: In this class writers can anticipate generating a lot of raw material. Each week we will focus on a specific creative nonfiction form and writers will use that container to write personal stories. We will also workshop student work in class together, but we won't follow the traditional model where students hand-out 20+ page manuscripts a week in advance and readers write long letters and margin notes. Instead, writers will bring shorter works to the group for workshop. My hope is that this will make space for more writing and more sharing.
Writing Workshops: What was your first literary crush?
Shelby Hinte: If we're talking literary crush as in character, then it was probably one of the interchangeable leading male characters in any of the Sarah Dessen novels I devoured as a young teen. If we're talking about authors, then (embarrassingly?) DFW or Samuel Beckett. Read into that what you will, but in short, I had a thing for guys who thought they were smarter than everyone else and who talked too much.
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Shelby Hinte: Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno. I was introduced to Zambreno's work in early 2023 with To Write as if Already Dead and I have been steadily working my way through her oeuvre.
Shelby is working through writers who refuse easy answers about truth and form. In her workshop, you'll do the same with your own stories.
Enroll in Toying with The Truth →Writing Workshops: How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
Shelby Hinte: When I can't stop thinking about it. I have a habit of "writing" while running which really just looks like me dictating to my phone as I run very slowly. If an idea has taken hold of me so thoroughly that I find myself shouting sentences into my phone while running down a mountain then I know the idea will sustain my creative energy through to the end (even when it gets tricky).
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Shelby Hinte: Books, movies, life. It's all inspiring if you're paying attention.
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
Shelby Hinte: I took a class with Caro De Robertis where they used the analogy of clocking into work as a way to think about writing. The example was that if you work in a shop, you clock in and you stay in the shop regardless of whether it's busy or not. Sometimes the store is full of shoppers. Sometimes no one comes in at all and you spend the day tidying. Sometimes no one comes in until right before you close. Whatever the situation, you stay for your whole shift. I grew up in a working-class family, and for most of my adult life I've worked 2-3 jobs at a time, so when I heard this analogy, I had this sort of lightbulb moment. I know how to work. I've been clocking into jobs most my life. It suddenly made writing so much less elusive. I do think that writing can be somewhat magical, but I also think it's a type of labor. It can't just be about waiting for inspiration to strike. It's about consistently showing up to work and creating the conditions for inspiration to be put to meaningful use. If you show up and keep working, eventually the muses will show up too.
"I know how to work. I've been clocking into jobs most of my life. It suddenly made writing so much less elusive."
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
Shelby Hinte: I think Body Work by Melissa Febos is one of the most encouraging craft books I have ever read. It's also different from most other craft books. The writing itself is as instructive as the content.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe?
Shelby Hinte: The word I see most in my teaching evals is "energetic" and once, when I taught in the jails, a student in my morning class (we met at 7am) said "How are you so alive this early?" If nothing else, I want my energy to be a kind of contagion that gets my students jazzed to write.
The students who show up to Shelby's workshops tend to leave with more than a revised draft. They leave with a different relationship to the practice itself: writing as something you clock into, not something you wait for. If you have been circling a story, returning to the same material and wondering why it won't resolve, this nine-week workshop gives you the container and the community to figure it out. Toying with The Truth: A Generative Nonfiction Workshop is about doing the actual work, and Shelby Hinte is exactly the teacher to show you how.
Ready to clock in? Join Shelby for nine weeks of generative writing, real workshop feedback, and a finished second draft.
Save Your Seat in Toying with The Truth →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
