GRWM— featuring Audrey Shipp

Issue #12

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GRWM (Get Ready With Me) is a new (and dare I say sexy!) segment where I'll be interviewing writers retro-style-- cute little questionnaires about what writers are wearing, listening to, snacking on, etc.  We want to know what they're into and what gives them the ick.  We want writing prompts based on their books.  We want to know their favorite song, the worst writing advice they've ever received, and you better believe we want to know their brunch order.

It's time to stop asking writers the same boring questions and start getting REAL.

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Audrey Shipp's writing has appeared in various journals, including Panorama Journal, Crayon Magazine, Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, LitroUSA, A Long House, A Gathering Together, and Américas Review. She has both a B.A. in English and M.Ed from UCLA, an M.A. in English from Cal State LA, and a Certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension. She is a PEN America Emerging Voices Workshop LA honoree and winner of the Barbara Abercrombie Scholarship from the UCLA Extension Writers Program. Her professional life has been dedicated to teaching English at high school level in Los Angeles. She is editing her memoir manuscript about writing and (un)writing in Los Angeles.

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Into It!

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Favorite Bookstore

I know they aren’t an independent, but I am enjoying Barnes & Noble because I use the Nook app. Buying electronic versions of books helps me avoid cluttering up my apartment too much.

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Favorite recent read

I enjoyed Diana Anyakwo’s young adult novel My Life as a Chameleon which portrays a young protagonist of mixed-race heritage who struggles with the physical and mental decline of an aging Nigerian father while also dealing with her own desire to disappear into the background of life events.

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Best Winter Purchase or Favorite Winter Trend

My best winter purchase was the memoir Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey. I was excited to read this recently-published book because it focuses on Samuel Beckett, and Beckett is prominent in the first chapter of my memoir.

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Worst Writing Advice

I luckily haven’t received any.

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Best Writing Advice

A scene is a fight, seduction, or negotiation. That idea comes from The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne.

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Favorite Poem

“Altazor or The Parachute Voyage” – an eighty-page poem in VII Cantos by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. Huidobro wrote in Spanish, French, and English, and he inspired me to write bilingual and trilingual poetry, as well.

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Brunch Order

Pancakes and fresh fruit.

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Weekend Workshop— Get practical, hands-on techniques you can immediately apply to your work in progress

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Liven Up Your Lines: Revision for Language Nerds with Mathangi Subramanian

Dates: Saturdays, March 1 - 22, 2025

Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM (EST)

Duration: 4 weeks

Where: Zoom

Have you ever stared at your manuscript and thought, "What the &#$% do I do now?" End your revision woes with this four week class!

We'll learn how to improve our work at the line level by exploring things like syntax, word choice, and sensory detail. We'll also talk about how to balance showing and telling, and how to get our work out there into the world. Especially useful for folks working on book-length projects.

What you will learn

• Distinguishing between scene and exposition

• Generating and using sensory details

• Using syntax to create emotion / vary sentence structure

• Identifying and generating poetic devices

• Identifying and generating a word collection

Workshop takeaways

Students will leave the course with a set of revision techniques they can implement immediately. They'll also leave with a better ability to analyze a piece of their writing and decide what types of revisions they'll need. Finally, they'll gain more control over their craft by generating examples of each of these.

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