Grammar Girl here, I'm Nion Fog Fog Fog and I'm here today with a very special guest, Anne Lamotte,

author of 10 New York Times best-selling books, California Hall of Fame

Inductee, and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She wrote both the beloved writing book,

Bird by Bird, and the influential book about motherhood called operating instructions,

along with obviously other books. She's known for her wisdom that makes a real difference in people's lives

with respect to writing and beyond.

I mean I asked on social media what people wanted to know about her and people just gushed with praise.

One person said, tell her I swim in public, carefree and content and thankful because of her.

Another one said, does she know how many women often whisper to ourselves,

no is a complete sentence. And the third person said,

tell her I think about her every time I make toast.

So Anne, you have obviously made quite an impression on the world. Welcome to the

Grammar Girl podcast. Oh thank you I'm delighted to be here. Yeah well your son Sam listens to the podcast and he got in touch with me

and said you're doing this really interesting writing retreat called Writers Rising and it's in late October and would intrigue to me most as he said

that it's based on sort of the concepts of recovery and I wanted to hear like tell me how your riding retreat works.

Well we've done two before they're both online and in person this This one's in LA, so I can speak from the in-person ones that I've done, but they work because it's a very weird and lonely thing to spend your time doing writing.

You probably know that as well as anyone and you get so many bad voices in your head that say,

well, do you have an agent or, you know, how many times have you been rejected or this isn't

going anywhere or in my case with this new book, boy, I talk about beating a dead horse.

But when you get together with several hundred people, they're all hearing those same voices too, and they're still getting their work done.

There's a famous line in recovery that the whole system works because we're not all nuts on the same day.

And so if, you know, five or six hundred people, they each get like a few numbers, five or ten numbers of people that they really bonded with and they call around,

...