A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts—exercises that can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, a novelist, essayist, or poet, you’ll find ideas and advice to motivate you to keep writing.
Brought to you in partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
Listen to Episode 33
Sandra Gail Lambert, author of My Withered Legs and Other Essays, started writing in her forties. She believes her age helped her cope with the “rough and tumble world” of publishing.
“There’s so much rejection [in publishing], and there’s so much feedback that is not necessarily accurate or kind,” Sandra says. “And when we’re older, we just have tougher skin.”
That resilience allowed Sandra to “look for something in their critique… that helped me be a better writer without paying attention to their attitudes or assumptions or prejudices against me.”
Sandra shares several prompts she relies on when she’s feeling lost in her writing. She also discusses why she chose to self-publish her novel The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller; why she always returns to the body in her writing; and more. Listen below!
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About Sandra Gail Lambert
Sandra Gail Lambert writes fiction and memoir that is often about the disabled body and its relationship to the natural world.
She’s the author of the recently released My Withered Legs and Other Essays from the University of Georgia Press, the Lambda Literary Award nominated memoir, A Certain Loneliness, and two novels, The River’s Memory and The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller.
Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Sun, The Paris Review, Uncharted, and Orion Magazine. She lives with her wife in Gainesville, Florida, close to her beloved rivers and swamps.