Cheryl Strayed

For review copies, bookstore readings and media interviews, please contact my publicists at Knopf, Gabrielle Brooks and Erinn Hartman. For talks, lectures and speaking engagements, please contact my lecture agent, Jenna Meulemans. Their email addresses:

Janet Silver of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency.

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I teach writing at conferences and retreat centers throughout the year. Please see my "Events & Workshops" page for details and links. I'm also an Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute in Portland, currently serving on the faculty of their Atheneum Program.

I do on occasion, but I'm not taking on new clients right now.

1. Write a lot.
2. Don't be in a hurry to publish.
3. Find the work that moves you the most deeply and read it over and over again. I've had many great teachers, but the most valuable lessons I learned were from writers on the page.
4. Be brave. Write what’s true for you. Write what you think. What about what confuses you and compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. Writing is risk and revelation. There’s no need to show up at the party if you’re only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes.

There are three answers to this question and they are all true: four years, seven years, and thirty-four years. I found it to be both very fun and difficult to write my first book. It takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline, determination, and magical thinking to keep the faith with a project such as novel--what is it anyway, aside from a story you made up while sitting alone in a room? The reason I finished Torch is that I finally came to understand that the only thing worse than having to really, truly write the whole damn thing was having to live with the fact that I didn't. The day I wrote the final sentence I bawled my head off for an hour.

About two and a half years. It was hard to write too, but hard in a way that felt familiar to me. Writing Torch taught me how to write a book, and most importantly, it taught me that there are good writing days and bad writing days and you simply have to ride through them all the way to the end, so I had that in me as I wrote Wild and it helped me keep the faith, even when I doubted my abilities. When I finished the first full drafts of both Wild and Torch I was away from home, in landscapes foreign to me (in the Warner Valley of Oregon for Wild and on the island of Itaparica, Brazil for Torch), and I think it had to be that way. I had to be entirely locked away inside myself to make it through that final hard push. The days I finished the first solid drafts of each book are among the most joyous and meaningful of my life.

You don't need an MFA to be a writer, obviously, but it can be a useful experience, one that may or may not turn out to be important to your success. Having an MFA will allow you to teach in a wide range of settings, so it's a key credential if you hope to earn your living as a teacher at the college level. MFAs get a ridiculous amount of unfair criticism, often from people who have never been in an MFA program or from people who are making judgments about all programs based on their experience in one. My advice to anyone considering an MFA in creative writing is first to get clear about why you want to get an MFA. Is it because you have nothing else to do and you sort of like to write? Is it because you're just finishing college and nervous about getting a "real job"? Those are not terribly good reasons to get an MFA and you'd be better served by waiting or doing something else until you have a clearer sense of purpose. I'm glad I got my MFA when I did--at 30, after I'd been writing seriously for a decade (with lots of time off to mess around and be a knuckleheaded twentysomething). I decided to go to graduate school because I'd been writing seriously for years and I needed a community and a program that would support me in my efforts to once and for all finish a book. I didn't go to become a writer. I went because I already was a writer and I yearned for the temporary shelter an MFA program would provide in the form of money, community, and time. I knew I would not go to an MFA program that didn't offer full tuition remission plus either a fellowship or a teaching assistantship, so I applied only to schools that offered significant funding to their students (there are a good number of them, though they're very competitive). This doesn't mean I think it's a bad idea to go into debt for an MFA--it might be a good idea, depending on your situation--but it's wise to consider what you're willing to do on the money front and apply to schools accordingly. I learned so much in my years at Syracuse University--from my teachers, my peers, and also myself (as I spent all those hours and months typing away or not typing away on my computer). There were hard things about graduate school, weird things, sad things, appalling things, interesting things, lovely things. I treasure that time now. Contrary to what you hear about MFA programs pushing writers to write "the MFA story," I was exposed to all sorts of writing styles and a diverse range of ideas about what is considered "good writing." I wrote the first half of Torch while I was a graduate student and the second half in the year after I graduated (running on the momentum grad school gave me and my credit cards). I learned how to listen to the opinions of others and also to get to those opinions out of my head and trust my own instincts.

VIDA: Women In Literary Arts is a nonprofit organization that seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities. VIDA was founded in August 2009 by poets Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture. VIDA’s structure is “grass-roots.” The individuals presently involved in creating VIDA are spread across the country, represent different identities, work from within a range of aesthetics, and share the common goal to create a forum at which all women writers may engage in much longed for conversations about literature being produced by women and its reception by the larger culture. I currently serve on VIDA's Board of Directors along with Cate Marvin, Erin Belieu, Susan Steinberg, Ann Townsend, Barrie Jean Borich, Kekla Magoon, Lisa Schlesinger, and Danielle Pafunda. I am also their social media coordinator, so if you have links of interest to women writers, please send them my way.

I plan to add more questions over time, so check back in a few months. You may also send me a message and ask your question for possible use on this page by clicking the link below.