Print length: 158 pages
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Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss, is a powerful meditation on grief, a deeply personal mosaic of a daughter’s remembrances of beautiful, challenging and heartbreaking moments of life with her family. It speaks to anyone who has lost a loved one and is trying to navigate the world without them while coming to terms with complicated emotions.
Lisa Braxton’s parents died within two years of each other—her mother from ovarian cancer, her father from prostate cancer. While caring for her mother she was stunned to find out that she, herself, had a life-threatening illness—breast cancer.
In this intimate, lyrical memoir-in-essays, Lisa Braxton takes us to the core of her loss and extends a lifeline of comfort to anyone who needs to be reminded that in their grief they are not alone.
Lessons Learned While Getting my MFA
Lisa Braxton
It’s been 14 years
since I earned my MFA in creative writing, and I’ve had plenty of time to
reflect on the experience. I can say with confidence that if not for enrolling
in an MFA program, I would not be a published novelist and memoirist.
My dream since
childhood was to write a novel. As I got older, I realized that I needed to
have a career, that I couldn’t support myself thinking up stories and writing
them. As a result, I decided to be practical and majored in journalism when I
went to college. I spent the first 20 years of my work life in various forms of
the field—newspaper reporting, television news anchoring and reporting and
radio news reporting—honing my writing skills, handing in finished pieces on
deadline, and learning to appreciate the skill of a good editor to put a
finishing polish on my stories.
However, the downside
of working in journalism was that I would come home after a shift mentally
exhausted and unable to think creatively.
After I concluded my
journalism career, I arrived at the low residency program at Southern New
Hampshire University armed with a 10-page submission I’d been working on for
years but didn’t have the know how or time to take it further. Here are some
lessons I learned while getting my MFA.
You have
to sacrifice something
In order to complete
my novel with the two years allotted in the program I’d have to spend at least 40
hours a week on my writing. To make that happen I gave up nearly all of my
television watching and cut down on phone conversations.
I had to
get to know my characters
In my 10-page
submission, my characters were wooden, one-dimensional beings. The professor
who was assigned to be my mentor had me create a lengthy biography on each
character to get to know them and have them behave within character throughout
the manuscript.
Writing
is only the beginning
Each chapter that I
submitted to my professor for review was merely the first version of a chapter
that would be rewritten more times than I can remember for how it worked as a
self-contained entity and how it flowed with the rest of the manuscript.
Graduation
day is bittersweet
I would miss my
classmates who I’d had critique sessions with, and open mic events at the
campus pub. They’d become my friends and support system as we navigated the
challenges of trying to create a salable manuscript.
The road
to publication can be daunting
The SNHU MFA program
had a board of advisors made up of literary agents. During graduation week I
pitched my novel to several of them. They smiled politely and suggested that I
continue working on my draft. Several graduates who’d completed the program before
I entered were on campus that week. Some had self-published. Others had gone to
small presses. And still others put their manuscript in a drawer and gave up on
it.
The MFA program was
the right decision for me. It gave me the jump start I needed to turn my
initial 10 pages into a 300+page manuscript that eventually became my published
novel, The Talking Drum.
About the Author
Lisa Braxton is the author of the novel, The Talking Drum, winner of a 2021 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards Gold Medal, overall winner of Shelf Unbound book review magazine’s 2020 Independently Published Book Award, and winner of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Finalist for the International Book Awards. She is also an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer.
She is on the executive board of the Writers Room of Boston and a writing instructor at Grub Street Boston, and currently serves as President of the Greater Boston Section of the National Council of Negro Women and is a member of the Psi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
You can follow the author at:
Website: https://lisabraxton.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.a.braxton/
Twitter: @Lisaannbraxton OR @LisaReidbraxton
Instagram: @lisabraxton6186
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisabraxton/
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