Meet Erika Krouse

Today we’d like to introduce you to Erika Krouse.

Erika, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Any working writer usually has to make a living through various means—for me, it’s teaching, consulting, side jobs, and occasionally I’ll get a little money from writing. A short story or essay might earn enough for lunch, and a book might earn enough for the laptop I just wore out writing that book. So, like most writers, I’ve been writing and teaching writing forever, mostly at the college and graduate level, independently, and through the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.

At some point, students started requesting one-on-one coaching for their writing and writing process, so I started a consulting business as a side-gig. Meanwhile, I started getting a lot of traffic on this little webpage I had started posting for my students, a kind of ranking of literary magazines for submissions. It was such a geeky page that I initially didn’t host it on my writer page, but after a while, I consolidated them. The traffic from that site drove a ton of students to my site, and I started consulting much more, to the point where I now consult as much as I teach or write.

Has it been a smooth road?
In some ways, it’s been smooth because consulting has been a natural consequence of the work I already do and love—writing, reading, and teaching. It’s been a bit of a struggle learning how to get organized and deal with business stuff, but that’s not so bad compared to the difficult work of writing.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
I work with writers to isolate the issues that present obstacles to creation and publication. Sometimes those issues are technical/craft ones, and sometimes they have to do with the writer’s process and difficulties in finishing a project.

My approach is a humanistic one: what might a reader experience when faced this particular character, this story, this passage, this sentence? How does that experience work with or against what the writer intends and imagines? What aspects of the story are important to the writer so the story can feel satisfying and complete? After we discuss what’s already on the page, we explore techniques to revise the story so it fits with the writer’s individual vision.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
The Denver metro area is so vibrant and dynamic, perhaps because the nearby mountains constantly remind us of our aspirations. They force us to take a long view, always showing us that there’s more to reach for.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.erikakrousewriter.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erika.krouse

Image Credit:
Amanda Tipton Photography for all but the one with the big sign that says “Read”—I don’t know who shot that one.

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