I work one-on-one with literary writers at all stages of their development, and with scholarly writers looking to reach a wider audience or develop a more harmonious relationship to their work. I’ve coached a number of groups as well, including the authors of Acquired Tastes (MIT Press 2021), Fellows of the National Humanities Center, and the New-York Historical Society Center for Women’s History Early-Career Workshop. (With Anna Zeide, I wrote about coaching the authors of Acquired Tastes for The Chronicle.) I bring over fifteen years of teaching experience, five years of editorial experience, and a lifelong interest in alternative pedagogies to my coaching practice. Reach me via email or the form here.
What’s the difference between a coach and an editor?
Our conversations will take shape around your values, your questions, your process, your history as a writer, and your goals. I’ll read your work and ask questions in return, and together we’ll come up with concrete next steps that move you where you’d like to go. Whether our work together is short-term or long-term, project-focused or not, you can expect to come away with tools and practices to carry into the future.
This approach is process-oriented, big-picture, and generative, even in the final stages of revision. I facilitate, rather than direct. Where “editing” tends to suggest taking away—cutting words or smoothing over bumps and peculiarities that “stand out”—I encourage you to magnify, not muffle, the singularity of your sensibility as a writer. Where editing suggests a power imbalance (a writer is being edited by an editor), your ambitions, not my reading experience, will occupy the center of our conversations. I refuse a scarcity mindset where acceptable outcomes are limited, and take perfectionism to be a tool of white supremacy. No “darlings” will be killed in our work together—instead, we’ll turn toward what energizes and moves you, wherever that heat may lie.
I see coaching as a means of supporting literary and scholarly production outside the demands and entanglements of the publishing and academic industries. This doesn’t mean I won’t help you enter traditional literary or scholarly publishing if that’s your goal, but that I will never take the norms of those industries as a given, and I commit to your vision and your values above all. For those (many) of us coming from harmful, abusive, or otherwise traumatizing graduate school or publication experiences, coaching can be especially supportive as a reparative, healing process.
Each coaching relationship is different. You can read testimonials from some of my former clients below (and more here), and schedule a free consultation to talk more about what this might look like for you. You can also write to me.
Testimonials
“My writing sessions with Helen Rubinstein have been the most intellectually rewarding and inspiring experiences of my professional writing career. I am an academic historian and am currently completing a draft of my first book manuscript. In May 2019, I asked Helen to guide me through the final stages. I was paralyzed in the work and felt frustrated enough to contemplate abandoning the project.
The previous summer, I had first worked with Helen at a writing retreat, where she introduced strategies and approaches to non-fiction writing that taught me to build an emotional relationship for readers to the historical actors.
Her lessons on compassionate and compelling storytelling guided me in the year since our meeting, however I was swimming in too much material and I needed her help prioritizing. I lacked the ability to fit the pieces together for my audience, even though the argument seemed clear to me. In our work together, she has taught me that organization is the most important yet least taught skill of writing.
Helen has helped me accept uncertainty, instead of avoiding it. In several places, my writing was overstuffed with details to compensate for what I could not explain or possibly discover. For those sections, she taught me strip away the excesses, leaving the bare bones of the argument and analysis to build upon. The revised chapters are more honest and more persuasive.
The most productive parts of our sessions have been Helen’s clarifying questions, where she points to rushed conclusions that deserve deeper reflection because of their place in the overall argument. In our back and forth, Helen pushes me to think out loud and on the page and to explore alternative interpretations and possibilities. Through this process, I have also gained a more precise language for the historical relationships and changes that I struggled to describe on my own. More importantly, I have grown as a writer and have learned to consider readers’ experiences more in my writing.
I am grateful for her generosity as a reader, her incredible ability to ask the critical questions of my work, and her range of ideas for moving forward in the writing process. While my work with Helen will end, her lessons will serve me well beyond.” —Heather Ruth Lee, Assistant Professor of History, NYU Shanghai
“I would recommend Helen’s coaching to anyone looking for a guiding writing light, trusted voice, and general doula-type for any creative (or non-creative) project. I would also and especially recommend Helen’s coaching to anyone skeptical of expertise, disdainful of writing advice, burned out on feedback, or who might be reluctant to share their work in its early stages. In more than a decade of various approaches to writing—on my own, informally with others, and through an MFA—my sessions with Helen are the first time I’ve left conversations about my writing feeling consistently and significantly rejuvenated (even inspired), with a clear sense of direction while also newly open to and aware of the possibilities of my writing. If I had known of Helen’s services earlier, I would have skipped all the other stuff.
When we began our sessions, I was “blocked” and unsure which of several deadend projects to continue with, if at all. In our work together, I have observed not just a profound change in the novel I thought was forestalled beyond recovery, but a genuine transformation in how I think about writing. As a result of Helen’s coaching, particularly her generous readings (as in, able to see what could be there as well as what is on the page already) and incisive questions, things seem possible in my work that I never previously imagined or allowed. My approach to the creative process has been fundamentally changed far beyond the scope of the project we work on together.
Helen is extraordinary on every level you’d want a writing coach to be—an incredible listener and reader, psychologically astute, practically helpful, pedagogically skilled, imaginative, engaged, and genuinely fun.” —L. Morris, fiction & nonfiction writer
Here are more testimonials, including from my work with the authors of Acquired Tastes.
I work with writers on…
Process. How can the act of writing become more pleasurable, exciting, dynamic, or fulfilling? What routines, practices, or rituals might support your goals? What should you do next, and what can you do after that?
Craft. Let’s talk about structure at the level of the book, the chapter, the sentence, and the phrase. Let’s talk about finding the details that bring your text to life. Let’s talk about how to shape your argument so that your reader changes their mind, and how to tell your story so that your reader never stops reading. Let’s talk style: how can your sentences look and feel the way you hope?
Clarifying & Generating Ideas. I support scholarly writers as they sharpen arguments, refine argumentation, and clarify meaning, and I work with literary writers to brainstorm plot points, scenes, details, form, and concept.
My trainings & orientations include…
Graduate coursework in composition theory, plus training at the Bard Institute for Writing & Thinking.
Ongoing training in and development of anti-oppressive and antiracist pedagogies, including with the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond and at The New School, where I teach courses in race, representation, and writing against inequity. You can read more about my approaches to teaching here.
Experience as an editor in acquisition and production roles. Please note, however, that I am not a practicing editor, and prefer not to edit others’ work until I have a deep understanding of their ethos as developed over the course of many conversations. If you are looking for someone to whom you can hand over your manuscript and walk away with a marked-up document, you may be looking for an editor, not a coach.
I am especially excited to work with those challenging dominant social and psychological narratives through their work. This includes intellectual, political, and cultural historians; scholars of race, racism, and critical race theory; narrative and literary theorists; and everyone writing personal, critical, and imaginative narratives that resist the mythologies of power.
Most people find my rates affordable, and many faculty find they can use research funding for our work together. (I can to provide a template for your funding request, if you need.) To the extent that it’s sustainable, I’m committed to meeting writers where they are in terms of resources, investment, and exchange.
Here is a sample of prompts prepared for a “Writing History as Creative Nonfiction” presentation at the American Society for Environmental History conference.