Sheila Bender
Sheila Bender is an American poet and essayist, best known for her popular books on writing instruction. She hosts a show on KPTZ in Port Townsend, WA. Works. Bender's many books on writing include "Creative Writing DeMystified, Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, Writing in a New Convertible with the Top Down, Keeping a Journal You Love, A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery, The Writer's Journal: Forty Writer's and Their Journals", and "Perfect Phrases for College Application Essays". Her memoir, "A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief", chronicles how  reading and writing poetry helped her cope after the loss of her 25-year-old son and find a way to live with love in the spirit of her son. Her newest collection of poems, entitled "Behind Us the Way Grows Wider", appeared in 2012. She has devoted most of her career to the teaching of writing and the improvement of writing instruction. In addition to her dozen books on writing, she has written instructional and feature articles for "Writer's Digest" magazine and "The Writer" magazine. She founded WritingItReal.com, where she provides an online instructional magazine for those who  write from personal experience and offers individual as well as online group writing instruction. Bender provided the prompts to the innovative journaling software "LifeJournal" with Chronicles Software, which helps writers not only generate interesting journal content, but organize and retrieve their ideas. She is also a regular instructor, panelist, and presenter at writing and educational conferences, including at Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and many locations where annual Writing It Real conferences have been held, such as Port Townsend; Oracle, Arizona; Nashville, Tennessee; and Istanbul, Turkey. Bender is well known for her three-step response method that helps authors  receive response from trusted listeners, which empowers authors' efforts at revision rather than have them feel their work is being "critiqued" or "torn apart," as the root of that word implies. Authors, she believes, can improve their writing and best fix their drafts after they have heard 1) the words and phrases that stick in the listeners' /readers' ears, 2a) the feelings listeners/readers have after hearing/reading a piece that they feel are in keeping with what the author attempted, 2b) the feelings that are in the way of fully appreciating the work such as places of confusion and  feeling left out, and 3) curiosities, where the audience wishes to know. Education. Bender graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in English and earned an MAT in Secondary Education from Keane College and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, and literary magazines around North America, including "The Bellingham Review", "Northwest Passage", "Poetry Northwest", "The Seattle Times", and the" Women's Studies Quarterly". She lives and works in Port Townsend, Washington. "Behind Us the Way Grows Wider", 2012 "Women Writing on Family", 2011 Publications . Anthologies. "Women on Poetry", 2012