Author, Tree Street Kids
By Amanda Cleary Eastep I read. A lot. About writing, art, marketing, business, religion, and homesteading. That’s in between the novels. I do this primarily to learn. But I also do it to encourage myself, which is something I’ve needed more lately. Writing as an intentional practice has been arduous. As an emotional and spiritual […]
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By Amanda Cleary Eastep Do you know which creature in the animal kingdom has the longest gestation period? Elephant? Nope. Frill shark? Ha! What’s so big about a 3.5 year pregnancy? The answer is a woman with an unfinished novel she started in college that insists on being born butt first. Technically, I finished […]
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By Amanda Cleary Eastep There were sticky notes everywhere. Just to make absolutely sure that the high school and college graduation party for my kids went off without a hitch, my mother had strategically placed important messages throughout the house. “pans for grilled food only” (read: don’t use these pans for E-coli-ridden raw meat holders […]
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By Amanda Cleary Eastep I’m back to volunteering to teach writing workshops at The Bridge Teen Center. What happens around that table never changes, not really, just the faces and the words. The need of these young people to express themselves is always there, despite their education or neighborhood or personal challenges. This is an updated post […]
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By Amanda Cleary Eastep I spent the first-month anniversary of my full-time freelance writing business on top of a mountain. OK, it’s not Mount Everest. But the symbolism in the act of driving down the winding Blue Ridge Parkway, seeing the seasons change before our eyes in the veins of a trillion leaves, and climbing a slippery slope to […]
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By Amanda Cleary Eastep I think about quitting. Letting go of writing like it’s some wild mammal I’ve tried to raise and train only to have it piss on the furniture and snap at my hand when I try to feed it. But who would I be if I didn’t write? I have announced, “I am a writer” […]
Read More[A version of this was originally written for a message I gave at my church, House of Saints and Sinners.] By Amanda Cleary Eastep Endless tips for better writing exist, especially when it comes to “cutting the fluff” of adjectives and adverbs that leave an otherwise solid story looking like this: Photo Credit: ozfan22 via Compfight […]
Read MoreBy Amanda Cleary Eastep “Why are you here instead of writing?” Author Brett Lott opened his session with this deeply disturbing question at the Festival of Faith and Writing last week. In preparation for the three-day event, I had asked God to speak to me through one of the conference keynotes–to clarify his will for my writing […]
Read MoreSeven teenagers sit around the table, notebooks in front of them, looking to me to teach them how words work. How words flow out of the end of that purple gel pen or the borrowed pencil and somehow arrange themselves on lines and into stories. I have barely finished a more-challenging-than-usual semester of teaching a media […]
Read MoreBy Amanda Cleary Eastep “Tesser well.” The handwritten words quiver across the novel’s title page, and I imagine the woman, then in her 80s, whose trembling hand penned them. “For Amanda” is written above the strange instruction, and below it, the name of my favorite childhood author, Madeleine L’Engle. In 2004, I mailed my 1976 […]
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Amanda Cleary Eastep 