Writing Resilience in May

 Writing Resilience is a 4-week Zoom writing workshop for people who have been affected by trauma, addiction, and/or mental illness. We will write our stories to empower ourselves and increase coping and resilience, as well as to work toward writing a memoir, poetry collection, or novel. Join the workshop that has been called "life changing" "useful and motivating" and "generated a lot of good work." The workshop meets Saturdays, May 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm Eastern. $169 for all four sessions. PayPal larissa_shmailo@yahoo.com

“Larissa Shmailo is astute, discerning, and perceptive . . . Larissa brings to the workshop the rare capacity of true interest in the work and the lives of her students. She affirms the writing in a way that demonstrates understanding of the content - through specificity and authentic reaction to the piece. This class allows the processing of personal trauma while also freeing it in the direction of publication. One is left realizing that the world does want to hear your story.” -—Sandra Kleven, publisher, Cirque

"Larissa Shmailo's Writing Resilience Workshop helped me to write again after a period of writer's block. In the past I have not been able to write in response to prompts, or to write in-workshop, but something about Larissa's leadership and compassion—along with the warmth of the group—freed me to participate. I am grateful for the experience and highly recommend the workshop." —Rachel Blum, author of The Doctor of Flowers

"Larissa Shmailo is a true warrior of the written/spoken word, as her life and work ignites her. What an honor to be one of her students! Her class is generative and I produced some pieces that were published quickly. We did in-class exercises and read our work aloud. Got excellent feedback from her, as well as the other students. If you get a chance to take Shmailo’s class, jump on it. She is a gift to the writing community. WOW!"—Meg Tuite, author of five short story collections, two poetry collections, and published in numerous literary magazines, as well as anthologies.

“This course created the space and structure in my life to make writing a regular part of my day. Larissa’s excellent exercises and insightful feedback served as the basis for rich class discussions and workshops. I felt connected to my classmates and found myself feeling at home among them— a rare treasure for such a compact time frame and over Zoom. I would highly recommend this course to any writer who wants to get back on track but is struggling to enact this desire day to day.” — Anna Fridlis, writing instructor, Parsons School of Design 

Patient Women now available from Barnes & Noble

Buy my new novel about sex addiction and recovery here!
Patient Women

What readers are saying about Patient Women!

What readers are saying about Patient Women:

Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!

There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. Patient Women is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by Patient Women. WOW!!! Unforgettable!

—Meg  Tuite

If you are in any type of recovery program, you will recognize the characters in this book as people you know. I read the erudite blurbs on the back, which would scare away most of the people I know [who] would find it a fascinating and compelling read. It may be a 'literary novel', but it reads like real life, reads like the lives of the people I know. Recovery friends, we are in this book! Great job award goes to the author!

—Yoby Henthorn

Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace. —Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Nora, born to a holocaust survivor mother, finds herself, at the threshold of adolescence in “boring Queens.” Lying about her age, her first transgression from her mother’s iron rule, she begins a series of ill-fated attempts to put distance between herself and the familial web she so desperately wants to disentangle from. She reels from one dysfunctional relationship to another, druggies, pimps, losers, and masochists, searching for her lovable self. This novel unfolds in a whirlwind that is sometimes her present. Be ready to have your heart broken and then made whole. —Bonny Finberg

Larissa Shmailo’s newest work, Patient Women, is an unflinching exploration of the lasting damage some people can inflict on their children. Nora, Shmailo’s protagonist, evolves as she struggles to understand and heal her own self-hatred and her on-going self-destructive choices. Slogging one's way through a morass of denial and repression is a strong trope throughout this raw, honest book. Nora is fiercely vulnerable and the sympathetic hero of her own salvation. This novel is dark, but there is hope that even the pain one lives through can cause one to create, finally, lasting and beautiful art.

—Joani Reese

Patient Women on Amazon

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