An exploration of the writing life by Francesca Lia Block, offers visceral insights and healing exercises for the writer who creates as a way to process pain and adversity. Block offers guideposts of awareness for writers, such as how to find a muse, channeling agony into art, putting chaos into order, ignoring the inner critic, fostering personal perseverance, and thriving as an artist in a troubled world. The author also addresses the intrinsic value of channeling our experiences into the written word and provides compassionate support to the reader for his or her own write-to-heal process"--

Francesca Lia Block is the bestselling author of more than twenty-five books of stories, nonfiction, and fiction, including the Weetzie Bat books, her series of magical-realism novels. She has received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award, and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as other citations from the American Library Association, the New York Times Book Review, and Publisher's Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles, a city the New York Times says she describes "better than any writer since Raymond Chandler." She teachers writing at UCLA, Antioch University, and numerous workshops across the country.
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of the literary journal 101 Word Story, co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, and the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Prompts to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books).