BIO

Rebekah Spivey studied creative writing and sociology at Indiana University. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana where the university is located. She has lived and worked on the Isle of Mull in Scotland and has helped to facilitate writing retreats on the Scottish Isle of Iona.

She is also a member of the Zoom International Writing Group, based in the United Kingdom. This group published an anthology of their poetry to raise money for World Central Kitchen’s work in Ukraine. Her work has been published in several anthologies.

She is a lifelong writer and lover of words who has co-created and led a group called Poetry Detectives, an informal group that discusses poetry in a non-academic way in order to make the genre more approachable.

She has a sixteen-year association with Women Writing for (a) Change, Bloomington, a group that supports giving every person a voice through writing.

Rebekah has been a certified facilitator with Women Writing since 2013 and currently facilitates workshops and writing retreats for that organization. Rebekah retired in 2012 from the Indiana Daily Student newspaper at IU after seventeen years as part of the professional staff.

Rebekah has given one-to-one support to many authors of wide-ranging genres over the past ten years. This involves frequent meetings with the author to do a paragraph-by-paragraph assessment in order to look at structure, syntax, flow, how to build believable characters if the work is fictional, proofreading, and anything the author might be struggling with. This also includes achieving clarity for the author as to their vision for their manuscript, audience, and scope of work, such as how to keep your audience engaged if you want your book to be interactive.

Rebekah is working on novels of her own and two series of short stories. She enjoys writing in coffee shops where eavesdropping pays off and can lead to some interesting writing ideas.

She believes that a big part of being a writer is to simply pay attention, notice, and that nothing is too small to write about. That writing can open the door where healing is needed.

She has found her own salvation in books from the moment she learned to read and believes that the more you read, the better writer you become. That when you are a writer, once you see behind the curtain, that is the lens through which everything comes to you. She has experienced when going through difficult times, that knowing everything is grist for the writing mill has gotten her through those times.

She loves the Joan Didion quote. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”