Meet the Teaching Artist: Sammi LaBue on Resistance, Persistence, and Writing Your Truth Into the World
by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
The difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful one isn't talent—it's persistence. That piece of advice, given to Sammi LaBue by the Canadian novelist Nino Ricci when she was still an undergrad, became the engine of a career that now includes bylines in The Sun, Literary Hub, Slate, BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Glamour, a creative writer's guided journal published by Penguin Random House, and over 2,500 students guided through workshops at her own Fledgling Writing Workshops, named one of the best in New York City by TimeOut NY.
This summer, LaBue brings that same relentless energy to WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, with Writing for the Moment: Turning Personal Experience into Impactful, Publishable Essays, an eight-week workshop designed to take you from raw idea to submitted work.
Over the course of the workshop, you'll learn to mine your lived experience for stories that speak to a larger cultural moment, build a portfolio of publishable work—including a flash essay, a personal essay, two pitches, a bio, and a cover letter—and gain hands-on experience with the submission process, right down to pressing "send" as a group in the final session.
If you've been waiting for the right moment to turn your experiences into essays that matter, this is it.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Sammi:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Sammi. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Sammi LaBue: Hi writers and readers! I'm Sammi LaBue and I've been obsessed with that feeling of having an idea and writing it down since as long as I can remember. Now I'm living my childhood dream as a multi-genre writer and writing coach specializing in leading my signature prompt-led, generative writing workshops. I freelance for places like HuffPost, Buzzfeed, and Slate and just finished a memoir written in collaboration with my mom titled "Bad Apples."
I just moved to the 'burbs of Westchester County from Brooklyn with my husband, my dog Oscar, and my beloved two-year-old, Jojo.
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class?
Sammi LaBue: Like many, I've been feeling a bit helpless about the state of the world as of late, thinking "what can I do," in the pursuit of justice, change, and healing? Time and again, throughout my life, writing has saved me from despair. À la Dory, when times are tough I remind myself to just keep writing, just keep writing. The act itself is cathartic, but I've found in the last couple of years that personal experiences have the power to make a big impact in the media space. When I craved a normalizing of infertility stories, I wrote them and a community of readers emerged. When I experienced a complicated and political kind of grief for my deceased, Republican father, a slew of people responded to my essays with their own version of that same feeling. I realized what a radical act of resistance and community building sharing our truth really is. Now I want to share those lessons with you and amplify your voices. We all have something to learn from each other. This is your chance to add your story to the media din that is hungrier than ever for our stories of hope, resilience, and honesty.
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?
Sammi LaBue: This is such a dynamic weekly workshop. In our 2-hour sessions we'll mix in-class writing time, sharing out, and immediate feedback with traditional lessons, drafting time, mini-manuscript reviews, and in-class submission support and go from idea to fruition to (hopefully) publication of our non-fiction work with very little out-of-class "homework" time.
How do I know it'll work? This course is an amalgamation of two of my most tried and true workshops developed through my own Fledgling Writing Workshops. Fun, productive, and supportive, you'll end the course with a flash essay, a full length essay, a pitch, a bio, and a cover letter. Plus, we'll culminate our time together by submitting our pieces as a group. If you're looking for a shepherd to turn those roving thoughts of yours into published work, well, just call me Little Bo Peep.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Sammi LaBue: While other little girls were obsessed with the Disney-fied version of fairy tales, I was more interested in reading and re-reading the more gruesome Grimm Brother folk tales from a dusty set of volumes that I rescued from my parents' storage closet. I believe these stories had a lot to do with my development as a writer, and probably a lot to do with the types of nightmares I still have today.
In high school I graduated to an obsession with Chuck Palahniuk books, which are equally gruesome and visceral. He wrote a book of essays about writing books called Stranger Than Fiction that I pored over as a teen, hoping to one day become a writer as prolific and dedicated as him. His craft book, Consider This, might still be my favorite of all.
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Sammi LaBue: At this exact moment, I have a fatigue headache because I stayed up too late torturing myself through a book that I love: Wally Lamb's newest The River Is Waiting, a novel whose first chapter hits like a ton of bricks and doesn't let up from there. It is heartbreaking, provocative, and I simply cannot put it down until my eyes won't stay open. The humanity of his work is brave and effecting, and I know I won't soon forget this story.
In the vein of resistance and writing for the moment I also just finished two nonfiction books back to back that I recommend in that exact order to anyone looking to enact change in this world. The first is One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by journalist Omar El Akkad about the violence in Gaza, a necessary but difficult read. The second is The People's Project, a collection of essays, poems, and reflections by a powerhouse group of contemporary writers. This book taught me how to put the active resistance El Akkad calls for into action.
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?
Sammi LaBue: I try to start every month with a reasonable plan for the projects I have in mind, and I'd say I stay 50% loyal to that plan. I find it's important to follow your energy. You can't follow every bright, shiny new idea at the drop of a hat, but if something energizes me to the point I can't help myself, I'll give myself a couple of days to lock in to it, especially if it's timely. I always have work in many genres going at once. I'm revising my memoir, drafting a novel, writing some poems, and have many essays at various stages all on my desktop right now, plus a list of ideas in the queue. It's a bit insane really, but I keep everything straight by dedicating days of the week to different projects. If I am in a fiction mood on memoir day, I switch their time slots but promise myself I'll give the other project attention. Energy is great for first drafts, but discipline is what gets the job done. Fridays are for whatever is most appealing or timely.
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Sammi LaBue: I don't believe in waiting for inspiration to strike, and it's a big part of my teaching philosophy. I call myself "the crazy prompt lady" for a reason. I believe we can invite inspiration to our writing desks by interacting with a photo, a line of poetry, a topic, even a single word. I also believe in lists. I keep lists on my phone of phrases, memories, observations, and obsessions. One of my favorite prompts that I use over and over again involves making four different lists and using the results like a word bank. Calls for submissions, contests, and columns also serve as prompts to me. Even if an essay doesn't land in the original place that inspired a piece, cruising for what different outlets are looking for can jumpstart something worthwhile. Lastly, I always turn to other art forms when I'm in a slump. A good show. A crazy documentary. A dance performance. You never know what might give you that feeling: "I have an idea."
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received?
Sammi LaBue: A visiting professor at my undergrad, the Canadian writer Nino Ricci, told me when I was young and hungry: the difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful writer isn't talent, it's persistence. This made a lot of sense to me. Plenty of amazing writers might fail simply because they give up. If you relentlessly refuse to give up, eventually you'll make it where you are trying to go. I remind myself of this constantly. If nothing else, I'll be the last man standing. And in the meantime I am honing my skills, interacting with the literary community, and learning so much along the way.
Writing Workshops: What is the worst piece of writing advice you've received or heard?
Sammi LaBue: While I'm always taking or leading writing workshops, and think it's important to stay connected to a writing group, I've had experiences in the past where the rigid, old school formula of workshopping centers the teacher and not the writer, ultimately doing a disservice to the work. A reader wants to see a familiar story told in a new and unique way—the way only you can tell it. Sometimes I feel participants (and this is no fault of their own) end up poking holes in a piece simply to fill the time of the critique section of a long workshop. People are searching for possible errors just because it's their turn to find some. If you take everyone's advice, you risk losing the soul of the original draft.
For me, I always try to center the writer and their vision, not my agenda, as a workshop leader. I also strongly believe that we learn just as much, if not more, from hearing what we are doing well and what is working in our pieces as from what isn't working. Getting a reader's perspective on what stood out to them helps us lean in to what makes our voice special. Like Audre Lorde said, "there are no new stories, only new ways of making them felt." I'll always encourage a writer toward authenticity and not try to fit their work into a box.
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing?
Sammi LaBue: I've already mentioned Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk, but I'll also mention Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider, and plug my own book of prompts and lessons: Words in Progress. These books speak to my hot take above—never prescriptive but instead encouraging us to write freely and without fear or judgement. No matter what the content of your work "the happiness in the doing is so important" (that's a David Lynch quote).
Writing Workshops: Bonus question—what's your teaching vibe?
Sammi LaBue: I've had people compare me to Adriene Mishler of YouTube's Yoga with Adriene (but for writing) and also Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I'll take both those comparisons any day. Come take my class and find out!
Yoga with Adriene for writers. Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. However you picture it, Sammi LaBue's classroom is one where you'll write freely, receive feedback that strengthens rather than silences your voice, and leave with actual work ready for the world. Writing for the Moment: Turning Personal Experience into Impactful, Publishable Essays begins Thursday, July 9, and meets weekly on Zoom for eight weeks. Spots are limited—enroll now and bring your story to the page this summer.
