I had been working on my writing for years. After earning my BA at Vermont College, I continued writing and working on the craft of writing. Then finally I applied to an MFA program and was accepted at Antioch University Los Angeles.

When I arrived on campus, I was such a novice. I had a completed manuscript in my hands as fragile as it was. I was so proud of myself for finishing it. I can’t even tell you how long I had worked on this, or how many revisions I had done. My professor read it and sent me home to rewrite it, saying it was more like a movie script, and he wanted me to write it as a novel. Whew!

That was the best thing that ever happened to me, thank you Leonard Chang, but I didn’t know it on that day. My heart fell to my feet. I was devastated, but I didn’t quit. Instead, I set out to figure it all out.

I decided to go for a dual concentration, both in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, and then when I graduated, I stayed another term to get certified as a Creative Writing Instructor. That is what brings me to you today. I have been writing since I was about 14 years old, starting with a teen column in a Nevada newspaper, the Tonopah Times Bonanza, and went on from there, but I had never been taught what I am about to teach you.

My book, Song of the Earth, was/is about the US/Mexican border crisis. I had been living this at the time but had since moved to Missouri to care for my elderly parents and to finish my book there. When I got back to my parents’ home from LA and was trying to figure out how I was going to put this book together, I wrote something about the Border. Just two or three pages, and sent it off to a friend of mine, a Mexican diplomat, in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. I asked him for his opinion, and I certainly got it. He was livid! “Susan, my dear, this isn’t Mexico and the Border, you’ve missed the essence of it all.” And that was when I realized what this was all about. I was standing back, writing about it from a distance.

On that day, I fell off that perch I had considered a safe place to write from, where I could see and document things, but not get involved. I knew if I got too close to it, my emotions would get the best of me. So, I moved up closer, figuratively speaking, and wrote the story from the inside, from my heart. My life and my writing changed forever.

The writer’s struggle that hits so many of us, doesn’t have to be such a struggle. In this class, we will explore the Emotional Center where most of the great writing is ‘unearthed’.

Students will be guided to a deeper level of writing, one that will cut out several rewrites with techniques that will help them get to the meat of the material early on, instead of writing around and around the core of your work.

Remember, readers are smart. They need to be engaged on an emotional level.

The students will find this course filled with new and creative ways to open themselves to a deeper level. Remember: If you write or speak from your head, no one will hear you, but if you write or speak from your heart, the whole world will listen. Also remember, if you unlock the door to your emotions, you will then be writing from your heart.