About Ana McCracken

Welcome to Write on Writers

where workshops are designed to inspire, motivate, and support writers from beginner to advanced. The objective of my workshops is to provide a safe and supportive setting for participants to come together to create new works or further develop works in progress.

A little about me. I am an Amherst Writers & Artists Affiliate, and a published author with pieces appearing in the California Writers Club’s Literary Review, and the anthologies Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God—51 Women Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection, and Chicken Soup for the Soul—The Joy of Adoption, and poetry at Telepoem Booth®Iowa. At one time I was a columnist and editor for Maui Vision Magazine, and my essays and articles have appeared in various publications around the San Francisco Bay Area.

My earliest writing was in the form of thank you notes sent from California to my grandparents back in the Midwest. And when my parents moved my brother and I from Los Angeles to Stuttgart, Germany when I was ten, I became pen pals with my next door neighbor, Lisa. (We wrote for twenty years before we were reunited.) After my family relocated to Illinois when I was thirteen, I later became an editor for The Opinion newspaper at Peoria High School. Because no one, including myself, thought of journalism as a career for me, I graduated in fashion merchandising, and went on to have successful careers in fashion, conference and event planning, and fundraising. For all my jobs, I wrote. And then the inciting incident—I was laid off during an economic downturn when I was still single and forty-one.

As luck would have it, my company gave me a nine-month severance package, and I landed with a dream on Maui where I lived for two years. The dream—to write a memoir about the search for my birthmother. It was at the Unity Church of Maui that I found my first writing-prompt workshop. Writing prompt workshops are the best because they provide opportunity for generative writing and becoming brave. Participants are asked to read (if they want) fresh writing aloud to the gathered group. I was hooked. Writing prompt writing afforded me the opportunity to practice writing without attachment, and to hone the craft.

During this time, I stumbled upon Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, and joined Artist Way groups, wrote to my own prompts, lamented about life in my journals, and wrote really bad pages of my memoir. Later after I left Maui, and life continued on back in the San Francisco Bay Area, I took writing classes taught by best-selling authors, and I wrote more bad drafts. Never giving up, I have persevered. And now, some twenty-years later I am nearing the completion of my memoir in an MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, my undergrad alma mater.

All this is to say that I enjoy writing. I’d like to say I love it, but it’s hard work. And what I’ve come to enjoy is sharing what I know about writing with others who want to write—whether it’s purely for pleasure, to write a family memoir, or the next best-selling book. The writers I’ve studied with have all said something like this: Each time I start a new book, it’s like day one in Writing 101. Writing takes practice. And the workshops I lead help you do just that. I hope you will join me.

One Last Note: Books That Have Informed My Memoir—

Let’s Take the Long Walk Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell; Heating and Cooling 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly; The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere by Debra Marquart; Slow Motion, Devotion, Still Writing, Hourglass, and Inheritance by Dani Shapiro; Five Plots by Erica Trabold; and When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams.

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