Before I realized that creative nonfiction was an actual genre of writing (because let’s face it, I come from a long line of people who think memoirs are self-indulgent oversharing), I was following and reading and listening to a bunch of awesome people who were braver than I was and had some pretty cool things to share with the world.
- Jane Ammon, without whom I would never have created this site
- Glennon Doyle @ Momastery, who wasn’t afraid to be a very public hot mess
- Janelle Hanchett @ Renegade Mothering, who writes the way I would if I wasn’t still a little bit afraid of criticism
- Brenna Jennings, whose post “Why Having a Toddler is Like Being at a Frat Party” went viral and made her famous (at least in my world)
- Jenny Lawson @ The Bloggess because she’s irreverently funny and honest
- Brené Brown because Brené Brown
- Bryan Crandall because he’s one of the best human beings I know and he made me love myself and my career again
- Sonya Huber because she’s amazing
- Anne Lutz Fernandez because she unapologetically chose me in the divorce and chose to spend the last few years of her teaching career working with me
- Danielle Laporte because her White Hot Truth series spoke to me
- a good friend of a friend @ Skipping with Scissors
- a best friend who wrote @ The Letting Go for a while
- another awesome human who wrote Livin’ La Vida Suburbia before escaping to Key West
- Gabby Bernstein, for a minute, when I was trying to figure out who I was
- Dave Eggers, whose novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius changed the way I thought about writing a novel forever even if I didn’t really like anything else he wrote
- pretty much every contributing writer to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency because they are my people even if we never found each other in real life
- Carmen Maria Machado, whose book In the Dream House lit a fire under my ass
(mostly) full disclosure 