Joe Sullivan

In the Literary Hub, Chip Livingston talks about Lucia Berlin, author of A Manual for Cleaning Women, as a writing instructor. She’s described in the piece as empathetic above all. It makes me wish all instructors were this way. She sounds absolutely lovely on a personal level. But also thorough in her critiques. Here’s an excerpt that resonated:

That approach of honor, from the writer and from the workshop participants, is how I most succinctly describe what I call the “Berlin method.” Lucia taught me to have empathy for the students and to praise them effusively when you’re recognizing the effort, the actual fact that they’d created something.