Hi All. My name's Kathryn (she/her) 🌱 Excited to see this little community forming, as I've been following Esmé's work and newsletter for a long while. I'm joining partly for that reason and partly because I need a place to go when I need a mental break from writing that isn't my girls chat on Discord, as much as I love that particular distraction! It's impossible to choose one favorite book, but some enduring loves include Didion's Play it as it Lays, A Bestiary by Lily K. Hoang, East of Eden, and Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. I started a draft this summer of a memoir I've had in mind for a long time that got a bit waylaid over the course of my MFA. I'm interested in meeting other MFA survivors (only being a bit hyperbolic here, lol) and sharing strategies and learning about other writers' processes. 🌷 I write nonfiction primarily but am interested in dipping into poetry, and my themes tend to center around living with mental illness, cPTSD, survivor narratives, art history, female friendship, and dissociation. I'm glad to be here.

@Malorie Nilson Welcome Malorie!! Nice to meet you here too. 💓 I haven’t read Body Work yet, but I’m familiar with some of the essays in it and excited to dive into the whole collection.

Handwriting can be physically hard for me sometimes since I work with my hands and have a problematic wrist, but I've been journaling more this year (about once a week) in a Kokuyo campus notebook. I love Pilot Juice gel pens and highly recommend them for anyone who, like me, has been told their handwriting is worrisomely teeny tiny. 🙃 .38 mm pens are my favorite. For non-journaling writing I draft in Word, and if I don't believe in what I'm doing I tend to draft in a google doc, which feels artificially less serious. Mind games are important when it comes to getting yourself to do the work!