by Writing Workshops Staff
An hour ago
“Pay attention.”
When we asked Whitney Vale to name the workshop breakthrough that still shapes her writing, that was the whole answer. Two words. It turns out two words were enough.
Whitney Vale is a poet and essayist with an MFA in creative nonfiction, and her work has a way of finding the light in hard places. Her poems and prose have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Rogue Agent, Anti-Heroin Chic, Crab Creek Review, and Quartet, among others. She writes several times a week, anchored by a writing group and an accountability group—the kind of steady, unglamorous practice that quietly turns ambition into pages. This week, that practice took a new shape on the shelf: her debut chapbook, Sermon of Swallows, arrived June 23 from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
Whitney has been part of the WritingWorkshops.com community for years now—eleven classes and counting, plus a week with us in Dublin. We’re proud to have been one room among many where she did the work, and the through-line across all of those rooms is unmistakable: she kept showing up, and she kept paying attention.
Her path with us began in 2023 in Elissa Bassist’s seminars on the tragicomic memoir, where she practiced putting hard, funny, true things on the page at the same time. The following spring she carried that work overseas to our Dublin writing retreat, where she joined the nonfiction cohort and worked closely with Elissa again. (She later told us the accommodations were “first class” and that she left feeling well taken care of, personally and professionally—exactly what a week in a UNESCO City of Literature should feel like.)
Back home, she became a devoted student of Mira Ptacin’s micro-memoir and flash nonfiction workshops, returning again and again—including for Paper, Memory, and Light, Mira’s class on writing through grief. If there’s a single sentence that explains how a memoir compresses into fragments, it’s Whitney’s own: pay attention. That’s the whole discipline of flash—noticing the small, ordinary moment closely enough that it cracks open into something larger.
Most recently she’s pushed into more experimental territory: Leila C. Nadir’s lyric essay workshop, where she began a hermit-crab essay that’s still keeping her up at night (in the best possible way), and John Sibley Williams’ class on blackout, erasure, and redacted poetry. You can feel that whole range in Sermon of Swallows—a chapbook subtitled a memoir in fragments, where the lyric essayist’s ear and the erasure poet’s eye for what to leave out are both fully at work.
The book itself moves through a woman’s life with unflinching tenderness: a navy-brat childhood spent never quite fitting in, a mother prone to rages, a distant father, and the accumulated losses of a long life—held alongside a steady love of art, of nature, and of hope. Award-winning author Lynn Slaughter writes that readers will be “deeply moved by the exquisite language” of Whitney’s poems, their imagery and emotional honesty. It is a slim, luminous debut, and a milestone worth celebrating loudly. You can find Sermon of Swallows here.
Ask Whitney how she gets through the days when the writing fights back, and her secret weapon is free of mystique: “It’s ok if it’s shit, just get something down.” And to anyone on the fence about taking a workshop, she keeps it just as plain: “The instructors are excellent and caring.” Coming from a writer who has now sat in eleven of our virtual rooms and one Dublin hotel conference room, that’s a recommendation we don’t take lightly.
What’s next? A new poem is forthcoming in Trailer Park Quarterly later this summer, that hermit-crab essay is still simmering, and the daily practice rolls on. You can follow Whitney on Instagram at @whitneyvale. Congratulations, Whitney—we can’t wait to see what you pay attention to next.
Every published book starts with a single, imperfect first draft—and a community willing to read it. If Whitney’s journey sounds like the one you want for your own work, come write with us. Our expert instructors, supportive workshop community, and proven track record of helping writers reach publication are all waiting for you. Your success story could be the next one we celebrate.
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