by Writing Workshops Staff
54 minutes ago
Samantha Mann is willing to be the bad guy. In essays for The New York Times, Vogue, The Cut, Elle, and TIME, whether she is writing about parenting puzzles, flaking on friends, or a night in an emergency psych ward, her voice holds steady by doing two things at once: letting herself look a little worse than she'd like, and finding the humor even when the room goes dark. That willingness runs through her collections Putting Out and Dyke Delusions, through the anthology she edited, I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy, and through her forthcoming book with Trio House Press, Slouching Toward Sanity.
It is also the engine behind Turning Your Big Idea into an Essay Collection, her ten-week nonfiction workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. The class is built for writers with a stack of finished essays, or one obsession they can't put down, who suspect a book is hiding in there. You'll turn that obsession into a working thematic statement, draft a complete book map, and develop two or three expanded essays strong enough to anchor the collection. Along the way, you'll learn to spot when two essays are secretly one, and when a single essay is trying to carry an entire life.
Below, Samantha talks about the essay she resisted writing for years, why waiting on your future self is a trap, and what a collection needs before it goes out into the world.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Samantha:
Writing Workshops: Week One of the class draws a line between an obsession and a topic. Your byline covers queer life, mental health, motherhood, and pop culture. Looking back, which of those was actually the obsession and which ones turned out to be topics you were using to get at it? How did you figure out the difference in your own work?
Samantha Mann: For me, I like to figure out how to make my obsession a topic. Wheater it’s something related to pop culture or something happening (or something that happened one hundred years ago) in my own life, I want to figure out to make the obsessive idea or experience an actual topic to explore and write about. Figuring out how to combine the two can be a challenge but the best feeling!
Writing Workshops: You've now built two essay collections, Putting Out in 2019 and Dyke Delusions, and you edited and curated the anthology I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy. What did you do differently the second time around? Is there something about assembling the first collection you'd warn a writer away from?
Samantha Mann: I am very of the mind that you should write with your current experiences and current craft tools. You will (hopefully) always be a better writer in the future. In the future you will always have a bigger sense of your experiences and how they connect to the world at large, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start writing about them today. I think not waiting to write is the best advice. I find that worrying about the future self (what will I think, will I be embarrassed, what if my story doesn’t hold up) stops people from doing the work to begin with.
"I think not waiting to write is the best advice. I find that worrying about the future self (what will I think, will I be embarrassed, what if my story doesn’t hold up) stops people from doing the work to begin with."
Writing Workshops: Your forthcoming book, Slouching Toward Sanity, comes out with Trio House Press in 2027. When you were living with that material, what told you what shape the book wanted to take? Is there a reliable tell, or does a writer only find out by drafting into it?
Samantha Mann: Slouching Towards Sanity (Trio House Press 2027) is a collection of essays that explores what happens after the addiction/trauma/assault memoir. It seeks to ask if finding lightness and acceptances and healing can be as interesting and rewarding for both writer and reader as the well-known trauma memoir. It is slightly different than past collections for me as this one has a tighter theme.
Writing Workshops: Week Five treats voice as the glue that holds a collection together. Your work ranges from a piece on parenting puzzles for The New York Times Magazine to an essay about a night in an emergency psych ward for The Cut to a piece on flaking on friends for Vogue. Those live in very different registers. What stays constant across them, and how would you help a student name the thing that stays constant in theirs?
Samantha Mann: No matter the topic, my writing voice is aiming to be comfortable making myself look “bad” or like the bad guy and have moments of humor, even in bleaker and darker situations. Finding your writing voice is the biggest challenge and always evolving, but once you get it, you can writer across topics and experiences while bring your unique perspective to readers.
Voice is the glue. Spend ten weeks with Samantha finding yours, then building a collection that holds together from the funniest essay to the darkest one.
Enroll in Turning Your Big Idea →Writing Workshops: Week Nine asks writers to find the emotional note they've been avoiding. Was there an essay in Dyke Delusions you resisted writing, and did the book turn out to need it? What changed once it was in?
Samantha Mann: I resisted writing about my experience being placed on a 51-50 hold for years (when you are involuntarily checked into a psychiatric facility). I wrote about healing and therapy and other ways in which I was improving myself but always left that out because it felt too big and frankly too embarrassing. It was part of my life experience that was such an important turning point for me, though, and it began to feel harder and harder to leave out of my work. It almost felt like I was lying to readers- and myself. It was such a relief to finally start writing about it. In doing so it dawned on me how stigmatizing the experience was and is for people, so I feel good about doing something small to help normalize the experience.
Writing Workshops: In Week Ten you talk about recognizing when two essays are actually one, or when one should be two. Can you walk us through a moment in your own table of contents where that happened? And is there a piece you loved that you had to cut because it did not serve the collection?
Samantha Mann: In general, I find writers struggle with personal essays because they want to fit their entire life story into one piece. They essentially want to write their memoir in an essay. You have to practice being comfortable leaving out important details of your life for the sake of telling on very specific story. Often when I am drafting an essay I’ll notice pretty quickly if I’m trying to tell too much about my life. That’s usually a sign for me that there a multiple stories in one piece. On the other end, it can be exciting to find two seemingly disparate life experiences and weave them together to find one specific conclusion about something true for you. It takes a lot of practice to see how to fit stories together, and I find being in class with others is a great place to do this because students can often see bigger themes for one other as opposed to the writer who is very focused in the details of their experience.
"It was part of my life experience that was such an important turning point for me, though, and it began to feel harder and harder to leave out of my work. It almost felt like I was lying to readers- and myself."
Writing Workshops: Publishing has a long-running reputation for saying essay collections are a hard sell. You've published two, edited an anthology, and you teach writers how to pitch. What actually makes a collection sellable, and what should a writer have in hand before they start querying?
Samantha Mann: If you are not a famous person (via the entertainment industry, social media, or reality television), you should ideally have a least a handful of bylines to show an agent that your voice and POV is already marketable. (I know using words like marketable when talking about writing is gross). This also shows you that you have some handle on essay writing and what is expected from editors and audiences. I have never published with one of the big 6 traditional publishers, so I don’t know the secret there other than to be somewhat famous. For independent publishers, do your research. Find publishers that publish books that are like your tone or voice or topic or general style. There are so many great independent publishers, but many of them are more niche is what they want to take on, so taking the time to figure where your work fits is a great place to start.
Samantha's advice about figuring out where your work fits doesn't begin with the query letter. A collection finds its publisher the same way it finds its shape: by knowing exactly what it's obsessed with. That's what this workshop is for. In Turning Your Big Idea into an Essay Collection, you'll name the question underneath your essays, map the book they add up to, and leave with a plan to finish it. Class begins Wednesday, January 6th, 2027. Bring the obsession you keep circling. Samantha will help you turn it into a book.
Ten weeks, one obsession, and a book map you can actually build on. Join Samantha on Zoom starting January 6th, 2027.
Save Your Seat in Turning Your Big Idea →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.
