Erin Michelle Gibes
L.C. Spotlight 11.16.20
Welcome back to the Literary Copywriter spotlight where I feature professional writers with creative pursuits. Today I interviewed Erin Michelle Gibes, a professional writer and book coach specializing in speculative fiction with a literary feel. She’s the founder of erinwritesmagic book coaching. Erin guides writers who need help communicating stories that resist categorization. She’s passionate about working with BIPOC, queer/trans, disabled, and neurodiverse writers because she wants to “live in a reality where everyone gets to tell their story, especially those who have historically been silenced.”
Let’s hear more from erinwritesmagic!
Literary Copywriter: Tell me more about erinwritesmagic. What inspired you to uplift marginalized voices interested in writing speculative fiction for a large audience?
Erin Michelle Gibes: First and foremost, I firmly believe everyone has a personal responsibility to find their own most powerful way to dismantle white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and all forms of abuse. As far as my own experience goes, I have spent many years in writing communities listening to heartbreaking stories of injustice from BIPOC writers, women and non-binary folks in particular.
I spent a lot of time feeling really angry and powerless about this problem. I've tried speaking up, calling out, calling in, donating money, supporting Black-owned businesses, and helping individuals in my small circle. But mostly it felt like, in my small corner of the universe without a lot of money, there wasn't anything of substance I could do.
And then in 2018, my marriage ended when my ex was arrested for domestic violence. I won't go into details, but I will say it was my second marriage, and the second time I wondered how I had ended up in a relationship with someone that caused me so much harm. I spent the next couple of years committed to figuring that out for myself.
It took a lot of therapy, a lot of shadow work, and a lot of writing, but because of the work I did on myself, I no longer feel powerless. I've drawn some conclusions about how the cycle of domestic abuse relates to the systemic abuse of Black, Brown, queer, trans, and disabled people, and I believe my experiences put me in a unique position to be able to help other people who have experienced abuse of all kinds. I also have spent many years in the speculative fiction community, including having my own short fiction published in a handful of paying markets, I've written and worked as an editor and copywriter since 2014, and I'm currently in the process of being certified as a book coach, all of which give me the professional and technical background I need to help authors specifically.
The conclusion I came to is that my best chance of helping the most people is to leverage the areas I excel in and know the most about (writing, teaching, speculative fiction) to help the people and communities most in need.
L.C. I'd love to hear more about your writing journey. When did you first realize that a. you are a writer and b. you wanted to make a living off of your writing?
E.M.G: I have been a writer since I knew what that was. I've been making books since I was 3. The first few were pictures-only stories about a girl named Sara who went on adventures with an elephant, but I also wrote cookbooks, instructional manuals, and lots of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror stories. I kept writing fiction all throughout my childhood and in high school -- but at the time, I was advised by my family and community against writing for a living. I spend most of my early adulthood trying out different careers that were deemed safe by my community -- I worked in call centers, as an administrative assistant in a variety of industries, taught elementary school for a while, and later ended up at a community college working as a career counselor. I never lasted more than a couple of years in any one role, and I always kept writing, albeit sporadically, and after a few bad experiences in critique groups, I stopped showing my writing to anyone.
But in 2007 I applied to, and was awarded, a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and the friendships and conversations I had with other writers there (Chloe Yelena Miller and Kate Miliken specifically) gave me the confidence to start taking my writing, and myself, more seriously. A few years later, I took a writing workshop called W)rites of Passage, with Sarah Schantz, who is not only a talented writer but is also an expert at giving critiques that nurture creativity and confidence. She was the one who first encouraged me to submit my work for publication. I'd had my share of bad experiences in writing groups (as I think so many writers have), so Sarah's kindness and encouragement had a huge impact on me. She also was the first person to hire me as an editor, in 2016 after my son was born, and that experience led to other opportunities for me to work as a copywriter, editor, and proofreader. I loved the work, but I was working from home as contractor, which was lonely. I missed collaborating with other writers, and I missed the teaching and one-on-one coaching I got to do when I was a career counselor.
Then, in 2019, I discovered Jennie Nash and her book coaching certification program, where I found a role that felt like a perfect fit for me to do what I do best. I launched erinwritesmagic book coaching in September of this year, and I love what I do. I still plan to seek publication for my own novels someday, but in the meantime (and while I'm still lacking childcare due to covid), I'm focused on helping other writers.
L.C. I love supporting professional writers who are also hard at work on a creative, personal project. This could be a novel, memoir, poetry collection etc. Tell me more about what you’re working on and what you hope to gain from the experience (book deal, more publications, career change, personal growth, etc.). Feel free to share how you balance work, life, and writing. It’s okay, if you’re struggling with this. It’s all part of the process!
E.M.G. Well, this one has been pretty severely cramped by the pandemic, but I have a lot of ideas about the parallels between the cycle of narcissistic abuse and systemic racism. I've been exploring how the cycle of abuse works in my own writing (some of which I've self-published on Medium), but I've love to have more time to get to the heart of this issue and see if it could be beneficial in helping white people understand how they maintain the status quo of white supremacy, often without realizing they're doing it. I also have bits and pieces of a speculative fiction novel that explores the narcissistic cycle of abuse through the metaphor of magical enthrallment, and I'd love some uninterrupted time to focus on that. I have many, many ideas, but finding the time to prioritize them all gets challenging. All in all though, as long as I'm writing something, even if it's only social media marketing copy or blogs for my business (or doing this interview!), I feel satisfied.
L.C. Say a client or a writer much younger than you said they want to write fiction but are afraid they won't succeed. What would you tell them?
E.M.G First, I would ask them for their definition of success, because that means different things to different people. For example, many "successful" fiction writers with bestsellers still have day jobs -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing -- I've talked to writers who prefer having a day job because it gives them ideas for things to write about, and having another source of income gives them the freedom to write what they want. So, does success mean making money from their writing or having the freedom to write whatever they want? Or does it mean having a bestseller that gets turned into a movie? Seeing their book on a shelf in a particular bookstore, or in the library (that's mine, personally)? Knowing what they want from writing fiction is the most important thing to consider before devoting their time and energy to it.
But no matter what their motivation is, I would encourage them to write the fiction they want to read, regardless of any perceived notion of "success," because even if they achieve their personal definition of success, it likely won't look or feel like they imagined anyway. I'd also advise them to find a day job they can keep for as long as they can. And most importantly, keep Neil Gaiman's 8th rule of writing top of mind: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Work on your writing skills, but always write what you want to write.
L.C. I'd love to hear any last-minute thoughts you have on the speculative/magical realism genre. What wisdom do these genres bring writers and readers? Do you think world-building is a skill people can develop off the page? If so, where and how can they begin?
E.M.G. I firmly believe that speculative fiction, in particular, is uniquely positioned to make positive changes to society in a subversive and highly effective way. In particular, works by Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin, Ken Liu, Rebecca Roanhorse -- and I could go on and on -- are teaching us all about systemic racism, classism, sexism, etc. through the most powerful medium of all: story.
Stories sneak into our consciousness in ways that directly discussing a topic can't. When we identify with a character, we experience what that character experiences. For example, a white person who's never thought much about how the history of colonialism and slavery affect Black people in the US today (or even thinks that this history is irrelevant) would learn a lot just by reading Kindred by Octavia Butler (which is a book I personally think should be required reading in high schools -- and don't even get me started on the current cultural relevance of Parable of the Sower because Butler's prescience is more than a little disconcerting).
I think there's this idea that realistic fiction and memoir are more effective teachers than speculative fiction, whereas I feel the opposite is true--because when a story is in an imagined universe, all of our preconceived notions, our opinions, our experiences--essentially, our egos--get caught up in the suspension of disbelief.
And for a moment, we're just in the story, we're just experiencing it. We feel what the characters are feeling -- even if we might not have listened to this person talking about their experience in real life--in a story, we want to know what happens next. And so where logic and compassion fail in reality, I believe story can succeed in breaking through.
To answer your question about worldbuilding -- my experience with writers has been that they either over-think or under-think it. So, they either get so caught up in the story that they ignore details, creating logic problems that affect their story in unexpected ways (like neglecting to examine how the existence of certain technologies in their story might affect people from different social classes in vastly different ways) OR they get so caught up in the details of their world that they exhaust all their energy planning and researching instead of actually writing the story (I once spent three days planning every detail of a spaceship designed for interstellar travel for a short story I never ended up writing, so I feel this one).
I actually have a tool on my website that addresses this issue -- a Worldbuilding Workbook -- that helps writers know where to start and where to stop worldbuilding so they can make sure the details get nailed down without getting overwhelmed. And this is certainly an area where a book coach can make a huge difference--a second set of eyes is enormously helpful when you're trying to hold all the details of an entire world in your head. That being said, worldbuilding is like any writing skill--it gets easier with practice. The most important thing is to keep writing, ask for help when you need it, and remember that our world needs your world -- so keep going!
Connect with erinwritesmagic
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