Blake Kimzey on This Podcast Will Change Your Life: Hope, Courage, and How WritingWorkshops.com Began
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
Episode 383 of This Podcast Will Change Your Life went live this week. Ben Tanzer, the host, has been recording these conversations since 2011, and he has a way of pulling stories out of his guests that don't show up anywhere else. This time the guest is Blake Kimzey, founder and executive director of WritingWorkshops.com. The conversation runs the full arc: from a cubicle in Dallas to a basement classroom in a Methodist church, from a Failure Resume to a global writing community of more than thirty thousand students.
The full episode is worth your time. What follows is a short orientation to what you'll hear, with context drawn from a decade of interviews Blake has given about why WritingWorkshops.com exists and how it grew.
Prefer to listen first? Episode 383 of This Podcast Will Change Your Life is live and ready to stream.
Play the EpisodeWhy this conversation, and why now?
Tanzer's questions tend to look small on paper and open wide once you start answering. He asks about the work, the doubt, the people who taught his guest how to keep going. Blake has given interviews for nearly a decade now. There was Lynne Golodner on the Make Meaning podcast, John Milas at SmokeLong Quarterly, a profile in Poets & Writers Magazine, write-ups in the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate and Voyage Dallas. He has told versions of the WritingWorkshops origin story in print and in conversation many times.
This one is different because Tanzer is. The episode lands at a particular moment. WritingWorkshops.com has just crossed thirty thousand students. Faculty include National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and writers with credits at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. From the outside, the school looks inevitable. The conversation Tanzer pulls out of Blake is a reminder that it was never inevitable, and that the most important parts of how it got built are the parts a casual observer would never see.
What does it look like when a writing school starts in a church basement?
The first four classes of what was then called Writing Workshops Dallas met in the basement of a Methodist church in 2017. Blake was working long weeks and overtime at an engineering firm. He had been teaching as an adjunct at UT-Dallas in the evenings, and a student had asked if he could audit one of Blake's classes. The administration said no. That refusal became the founding moment. Blake decided to build a writing school that would say yes.
The first room was the basement. He handled the registrations, answered the customer emails, swept the floor, and, in the Texas summers, turned on the oscillating fans before students arrived so the classroom would be cool enough to think in. He still calls himself the janitor of WritingWorkshops.com. He says it with affection. People who have built something they love tend to remember the unglamorous tasks fondly, because the unglamorous tasks are how the thing got built in the first place.
The seed for the school had been planted two years earlier. Blake heard a podcast in 2015 in which a guest said you have to love where you live, and if something is missing where you live, you have to build it yourself. He chewed on that advice for two years before opening the basement door for that first class of four.
Hope and courage: the two books that became a mission
In the conversation with Tanzer, Blake tells the story of telling his father he wanted to be a writer. The response was unexpected. His father gave him two books. One was called The Writer's Book of Hope. The other was called The Writer's Book of Courage. Those twin ideas, hope and courage, became the guiding lights of WritingWorkshops.com. The school exists to give writers the confidence to put their authentic selves onto the page. Not the version that wins. Not the version that pleases. The real one.
It is a generous frame for a writing school, and not a sentimental one. Anyone who has tried to put their authentic self on the page knows how much courage that takes. Sustaining a writing life across years asks an equal amount of hope. The phrase you hear from Blake again and again, in the Tanzer episode and in nearly every interview he has given since 2017, is some version of this: writers don't need motivation, they need community. Community is what turns isolated hope into actual momentum.
"We started WritingWorkshops.com to give writers the confidence to put their authentic selves onto the page, and to give them a community of writers around the table who take their work as seriously as their own."
Blake Kimzey, Founder & Executive Director, WritingWorkshops.com
The founding ethos became a program. IndieMFA is the school's most ambitious answer to the question of what comes after the MFA-or-nothing model.
Learn About IndieMFAWhat's a "Failure Resume," and why does Blake talk about his?
Most founders write resumes. Blake also keeps a Failure Resume.
The phrase has been around in entrepreneurship circles for years. Blake uses it the way it was meant to be used, as a counterweight to the survivorship bias that warps how writers see other writers' careers. He has two unpublished novels sitting in a drawer. The list of rejections he has collected from journals, agents, residencies, and fellowships is long enough to fill a notebook. Stories he wrote years ago found homes at Tin House and McSweeney's and were adapted for broadcast on NPR; others he believed in went nowhere, despite years of revision.
The episode dwells on this honestly. Most of what writers see online is the highlight reel: book deals, blurbs, cover reveals, awards. What writers rarely see is the part Blake describes openly in the Tanzer interview. The work that didn't land. The years it took to learn what to do with that. The way teaching helped him understand his own writing life better than another year of trying to publish in private would have.
He calls this failing publicly. The phrase sounds rough but the practice is gentle. If a writer at the start of their career can see that the founder of the school they are looking into has two novels in a drawer and shows up for class anyway, they may be more willing to draft the messy first chapter that becomes their own first book. Part of what the Tanzer episode is doing is making the unseen part of the writing life visible.
From four classes to a global community of writers
What started in a church basement now runs thirty to forty classes a month and reaches writers on six continents. WritingWorkshops.com is the official education partner of Electric Literature. The destination retreat program has expanded to Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Portland, and Mackinac Island. There is now an alternative to the traditional MFA, called IndieMFA, designed for writers who want the deep mentorship of an MFA without the cost or the two-year campus relocation. More than thirty thousand writers have studied with us.
The faculty list reads like a wish list. There are National Book Award finalists and Pulitzer nominees, New York Times bestsellers, and writers with credits at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Paris Review, and McSweeney's. Among them are Ramona Ausubel, Marie-Helene Bertino, Brandon Hobson, Morgan Talty, Chloé Cooper Jones, Stewart O'Nan, Karen E. Bender, Chloe Caldwell, Halimah Marcus, Mary South, Ethan Joella, Diana Spechler, Elissa Bassist, Thao Thai, Kelly Luce, Omer Friedlander, and dozens more.
The alumni outcomes are quieter and more telling. Alumni have signed with literary agents, published debut novels and story collections, been selected for the TODAY show book club with Jenna Bush Hager, won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and earned admission to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Michener Center, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia. The Tanzer episode gets at why this list exists, and what the school has been doing to make outcomes like these more accessible to writers who would once have been priced or geographically locked out of them.
Thirty to forty new classes open each month. Find the workshop, mentorship, or seminar that fits where your writing is right now.
Browse All Online ClassesWhy this episode is worth your full attention
If you are a writer at the start of something, this conversation will sound like a description of your own life. Writers in the middle of something that isn't working will hear how someone they respect made peace with a Failure Resume of his own. Anyone weighing whether a writing community could move their work forward in ways solitude has not will recognize, in this episode, one of the most honest arguments for it we know how to make.
Ben Tanzer is also returning to WritingWorkshops.com on September 29th, 2026, to teach his seminar Introducing the Power of Hope to Your Writing Process. The seminar is the practical companion to the podcast conversation. Tanzer brings nearly three decades of experience helping writers, authors, and creative professionals get unstuck and back to the page, and the class teaches the three pillars of hope (goal setting, pathways, and willpower) as a working method. You can browse his full slate of classes at WritingWorkshops.com on his instructor page.
Listen to the full conversation: This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode 383, with Ben Tanzer and Blake Kimzey.
Listen to Episode 383About the author: Blake Kimzey is the founder and executive director of WritingWorkshops.com. He holds an MFA from UC Irvine. His fiction has been broadcast on NPR and published in Tin House, McSweeney's, VICE, Longform, The Masters Review, and more than seventy literary journals, and was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2015. His story collection, Families Among Us, was published by Black Lawrence Press. He was named one of D Magazine's Artists to Learn From, sits on the board of the Elizabeth George Foundation, and moderated The Big Conversation for The Writer's Chronicle on independent writing programs as MFA alternatives.
About WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
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.
