Stay With Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life
By Cindy Shearer
With rejection and intense commitment such integral parts of the writing life, many struggle to stay with the creative process. Combining explorations of perseverance, intention, riding through failure, and meaning-making with bringing oneself fully into one's art, Stay With It offers writers practices to sustain their writing and their creative life. Through a hybrid of craft, pedagogy, memoir and personal essay that call upon reflective exercises and prompts, Cindy Shearer helps writers understand themselves as artists as well as the nature of writing as an artistic process and practice…
This is for every writer who has experienced failure or discouragement, who has wondered how they can ever start again. Shearer reminds us, through her own experience, her wisdom and through a range of creatively salutary exercises that writers of every stripe can indeed come back to their art and stay with it.
-Tanya Perkins, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University East, USA
News:
Cindy Shearer Invites Writers to Stay with Their Writing in New Book
All chapters include memoir/essay, reflection, prompts, exercises, and resources. With its combination of insight, honesty, and inspiration, Stay With Writing is designed to be a companion for writers at every stage of their writing life.
Events:
On Sustaining Your Creative Life (March 5, 2026): Conversation with Emlyn Guiney and Cindy Shearer
Cindy encourages writers to understand themselves as artists, and for artists across all mediums to learn about themselves from writing. She discusses how to recognize failure as a way to probe what you really want to create and how to claim an artistic process that you can rely on for support again and again. She shares how to practice perseverance, intention setting, riding through failure, and meaning-making by bringing oneself fully into one’s art.