You need to know about my friend Stephanie Dethlefs. She and I met years ago and have been in a writing group together for 12 years. She is a beautiful writer with a penchant for brevity and her work is breathtaking. She is also an insightful writing coach with her own Substack where she started a monthly book club called Reading Like Writers. Here’s what she says about it:
In this unique book club, we'll take one novel per month and examine the specific moves that the author made, and then generalizing those skills for use in our own writing. The goal of Book Club is to look for craft and structural decisions that the author made, and consider how those moves might be applied to our own work.
Click on her Substack link above to learn more and to join.
She asked me to join her for monthly discussions of the book-of-the-month in which we talk about what we appreciated in the writing — or not! Starting today, these recorded monthly conversations will be shared here with you.
The book we discussed in August was Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. Enjoy our conversation.
The book we’ll be discussing at the end of September is Ruth Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea. I’m reading it for the second time and am reminded of how griping this story is, a story about a forgotten tragedy during World War Two.