The Wayward Writer

Create your liberated literary utopia

When your dream and creative passion is to write, how do you succeed without selling out or selling yourself short? Ariel Gore has spent her life solving this puzzle, writing and organising her way towards a creative utopian vision, where storytelling is a form of resistance and writing is an outsider art.

In this follow-up to her national bestseller How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, Gore offers a lyrical call to literary revolution paired with practical exercises. Through her own experiences and interviews with other authors, publishers, and agents, she shows you how to chart your own creative education, vanquish shame and imposter syndrome, cast off oppression, cast a spell on your readers, step into your unique powers, and build your own literary community where respect and honesty reign—and where you can be a writer and survive.

Gore presents an alternative narrative structure to the patriarchal hero's journey, with a focus on tapping into myths and hidden places. She urges us to not be precious about where or when we write, or to apologise for who and what we are, or to stop short of telling the truth about our lives. The result is an impossible to ignore rallying cry for writing dangerously to create a liberatory literary utopia—and a helpful guide through the thorny landscape of publishing your work.

Includes interviews with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Johnny Temple, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Reyna Grande, Michelle Ruiz Keil, Jisu Kim, Adrian Shirk, Mai'a Williams, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Laura Mazer.