about Elizabeth

I’m the author of Girly, creator and editor of This Is Not Chick Lit, and writer of Boys for Pele which I keep promising is coming soon. There have been some weird delays. This book, Pele, like the 1996 Tori Amos album she is based on and the goddess the album is based on: she does her own thing, to an extreme.

In the past I created two acclaimed writing series for women literary writers in NYC,  and way back in 2003 I created Elizabeth’s Workshops,  classes with their own unique right-brain based methods and a totally not-snotty, no-BS-lit-world vibe, in Brooklyn, which I shut down in 2008 because it was finally time for me to leave New York.

I have a BA from Yale, an MFA from Cornell, and an MA in Creativity and Arts Education from San Francisco State.

While I don’t have regular classes anymore, I still do one-on-one writing coaching and book editing for people I like. Right now I don’t have any openings available.

 

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Boys for Pele: deep in the girl-zone

Hey everybody, I am leading a very low-internet-impact lifestyle at the moment, I am happy to report. I completely forgot how to even get on here and put up a blog post.  But I have now remembered how to do it,  so I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m currently deep in the writing of a book about Tori Amos’s excellent 1996 album Boys for Pele.

The Boys for Pele book is very fun writing. For those of you who know this album, it is probably not a surprise to hear that it’s throwing me for a few curves and providing lots of mysterious transcendental surprises that are a total pleasure to encounter as a writer.

For various reasons I have to write this book really slowly, so I am using a method I read about in this amazing creativity guidebook by Lynda Barry that I cannot recommend strongly enough.

I am writing large portions of this book with brush and ink. I’m lucky if I get two sentences on a page! It’s ridiculous but my god is it so much better than what happens to my writing process when my brain gets to race and race and race.

It’s the yin yoga of writing. One of these years I’ll figure out a way to cover the floor with a tarp and have a writing class where we get all kinds of fun art supplies to make it even better than the writing longhand I’ve always required of my students in class.

When I remember I am posting little updates of these weird Pele encounters that sometimes pop up in this process as well as pictures of my weird crappy rough draft writing pages online at my experimental (for me: I am allergic to social media so we’ll see how long I last) semi-secret twitter account @elizabetherself.  It’s so freeing to just let the rough draft be a total mess on its own and to let little bits of it out, without Spanx on.

For the Toriphiles/EWFs, let me just say I chose to write this book because over the years Pele has pulled me in with her big-ass mysteries and then amazingly unlocked some of them–there’s a bit of a treasure hunt that is “plain to see, it is rising.”  But as I write all these other–to me–just totally shocking secrets hidden in the so-called “impermeable” lyrics keep offering themselves up. Last night Superfly landed at my desk and said: YO. And I was shocked I’d never really seen it before, this one little secret the album holds in the “Off with Superfly sniffing a Sharpie pen” line in “Horses” that so many critics could and did easily dismiss as associative trippy weirdness from a “kook.”

I was scared, originally, to write about music but it’s turning out to be just a total joy.

It was hard at first to feel okay writing the book for deep-Toriphiles such as myself. As of now I’m not worrying about walking the reader through a sort of basic primer level of Tori Amos/BFP. Aren’t there a million articles by now that talk about the Peabody Conservatory and Y Kant Tori Read? Not for me.

I will probably have to add something in later to cover those basics, but for now, I’m writing Pele so as not to totally bore people who have read many if not most of her interviews, people who are probably a little bummed if a Tori show doesn’t include enough b-sides, etc. Yet: as the themes and truths of Pele are universal, the book seems to be writing itself in a way that is accessible to anyone who is interested in creativity, self-expression, transformation, revealing hidden or “shameful” truth.

This book is about creativity in general, and women’s creativity post-feminist-revolution specifically. Boys for Pele is all about intense, uncensored expression. The album was central to my getting my own grounding as a young artist in my 20s, it was essential to writing my novel Girly, and it holds deep, and quite practical (“easy like one, two, three”)  truths on how to function as a creative revolutionary (that’s Pele talking about the “revolutionary” stuff! As I’m writing it’s so weird but I can really feel Chuck D energy in this album).

Anyway, I am just so excited to geek out on being a Pele detective, and to share this adventure with my brother & sister Pele geeks when the book comes out.

xoxo Love, Elizabeth

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