About Becky Karush
Photo: Maria Day Photography
This is also how I look when I see the power and beauty in your work.
Becky Karush is a writer and writing coach who has led more than 400+ writing workshops. She graduated from Wesleyan University (B.A.) and Emerson College (M.A.). She's worked as a teacher, farmer, journalist, Disney magazine editor, and copywriter. She is a 2022 Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies and a recipient of a 2024 grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Becky is the founder of Read to Me Literary Arts, where writers learn to dazzle us and themselves with fresh, brilliant writing. Through group writing salons, individual coaching, the Read to Me podcast, and tools to support your solo writing practice, we help you surface and develop your innate talent. We know you can write amazing things, and so you do.
She lives in southwestern New Hampshire with her family and cat. She is working on a novel.
founder of Read to Me Literary Arts
I am a writer, copywriter, and family woman. I came up through newspapers and magazines, with road trips to teaching and farming.
I’ve run Read to Me Literary Arts in various forms since 2012.
And I’m a writer who didn’t write for 16 years.
Oh, I wrote professionally. There were poems here and there. One about arugula.
In my early 20s, I wrote a lot of folk songs because I decided I didn’t need to be good at playing the guitar and singing. I could just play.
See, as a teenager, I started to write poetry, as one does. My little hippie high school in Vermont saw the birth of poems on Thomas Tallis and sad parents, Jewish grandmothers and pickerel.
I felt poems rising from my arms. I fell into ecstasies of concentration. I forgot about lit candles and almost burned down the wood cabin I lived in. (Of course I lived in a one-room wood cabin without electricity.)
I got some praise. I won a cool award that let me go to the Gramercy Club in New York City and meet Very Important Poets.
The attention ruined me.
The attention, plus an awkward move to college, plus the absence of training in how one lives as an artist—not how you earn a living, but how to practice your art, keep a sensitive heart, and do all the daily life things—just plain ruined me.
I went to the page hungry for praise. I went furious at myself for not being able to produce praise. I went rejected by professors, journals, contests, other students.
I went heartbroken because my arms were empty. No more poems rose. Whatever I wrote congealed on the page.
“You need to be less sensitive,” worried friends said.
“You need to stop disappearing on us,” frustrated friends shouted, when I wandered away from them after watching Othello at the campus film series, trying to catch a wisp of inspiration.
“You need to lighten up. This is just your juvenalia,” said the high school teacher I revered.
“You need to study everything before you create anything,” said the chair of the English Department.
“You never finish anything anyway,” said the most dour generational echo of my childhood, “and you have no future and god doesn’t love you.”
College was fun.
What happened next
When I was 37, I went to a writing workshop with the founder of Gateless Writing, Suzanne Kingsbury.
My experience in these salons—which focused on listening for the power and beauty of the work—led me back to the page.
A bunch of years passed.
I became a writing teacher. I taught hundreds of classes. I coached writers—and they made progress! I started a podcast based on the principle of brazen listening as a core writing skill.
I also started writing a novel, and for the first time in my adult life, I developed a writing practice. It’s the creative work of my life.
And now?
After the pandemic lockdown, I needed a break from teaching and a lot more time for the writing practice. So, Read to Me workshops are currently on hiatus. We’ll be back in the winter of 2024.
The Read to Me podcast is relaunching the summer of 2024.
My Substack is alive and well! Come join me there for letters and stories on writing, reading, and listening to encourage and advance your work. I also share my newly published work there.
I can’t wait to meet you by and by.
xxoo, Becky