#103 Launching Into New Dimensions with Embodied Writing Featuring Jeannine Ouellette

Jeannine Ouellette’s lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. She is also the author of the picture book, Mama Moon. Her literary essays and short fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Masters Review, Calyx, and many others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a Millay Colony for the Arts fellow and past juror. Her bestselling Substack, Writing in the Dark, is a passionate creative community for people who “do language,” where writing is part of a deeper, vaster conversation about how attention, curiosity, playfulness, and surprise provide a portal to the profound on the path to becoming, because talking about “how to write better” without that larger context is kind of boring. Ouellette teaches writing at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the University of Minnesota, where she also facilitates narrative health writing workshops for healthcare professionals and the public. She is working on a novel. 

 

In this episode:

• Finding her way into literary writing later in life [4:15]

• Creating art that blurs boundaries [7:20]

• Making magic with metaphor and the language of nature [9:34]

• Dealing with difficult childhood experiences through writing [9:51]

• Traversing the intersection of fiction and memoir [8:18]

• Using writing rules and constraints to build a world on the page [12:15]

• The workshop that broke Jeannine wide open [15:50]

• The risk of writing from the perspective of a child narrator [22:52]

• Writing about motherhood and being in one’s body [27:22]

• Jeannine’s story of the growth of her substack and advice for building a profitable digital newsletter [41:13]

 

Connect with Jeannine:

Substack

Facebook

Instagram

X/Twitter

 

Connect with Estelle:

 

Watch Estelle’s episode #81 with Maggie Smith (mentioned in this episode). The Art of Shaping a Compelling Story

https://estelleserasmus.com/81-the-art-of-shaping-a-compelling-story-featuring-maggie-smith/

​​FREE PITCHING GUIDE: Find out more about this episode at 

https://estelleserasmus.com/podcast. You also get a free pitching guide if you sign up for her newsletter.

 

Sign up for Estelle’s Personal Essay Class for Writer’s Digest 

https://www.writersonlineworkshops.com/courses/writing-the-per