Lisa Munro
Building Writing Communities

I’m building new communities of people and relationships with others to support people in their creative ventures. I'm also thinking about how to have more joy in writing. What might shift for us as writers and people if we looked for those moments in which writing feels joyful and creative? What if we allowed struggle and joy to overlap? Struggle and joy in the creative process might be better thought of as a both/and than an either/or.

Building Writing Communities
Lisa Munro
The Flying Leap

Sometimes you just have to take The Flying Leap, engaging in some big inspired action that would otherwise make no sense under ordinary circumstances. The Flying Leap occurs when your inspiration and desire for change become bigger than your fear.

The Flying Leap
Lisa Munro
Trauma and Truth-telling

Reclaiming trauma stories and telling those stories as our personal truths is different from creating victim narratives. They might sound similar, but victim narratives almost always involve blame, either explicit or implicit. Reclaiming your pain and trauma story means standing tall in your truth, no matter how much it hurts.

Trauma and Truth-telling
Lisa Munro
Learned Helplessness, Part II: Thinking Inside ...

If you’ve ever felt helpless, you may have been the sitting-on-hands-and-complaining-loudly person. You refuse to accept any solutions to your problem. You reject any solution as ridiculous and preposterous at best, and downright foolish and risky at worst. At this point, you’re not actually trying to solve problems, even though you pretend you are. You're in the grips of the "Yes, but..." syndrome

Learned Helplessness, Part II: Thinking Inside the Box
Lisa Munro
Leaving Academia: Loss, Grief, and Healing

The grief I felt when I conceded defeat on the job market was the real deal. I cycled through every one of the Kubler Ross model’s stages of grief several times. And as anyone who has been through the five stages of grief knows, they are not really stages at all, but rather suggestions. Grief is a full body contact sport that involves cycling and recycling through the stages of grief, moving forward and backwards and sideways at the most inopportune moments until the heart and soul decide there’s nothing more to be done and they’ve let go. There’s nothing rational about grief and no time table to “get over it.” It’s insanely confusing and consumes massive amounts of emotional resources. Grief is involuntary and wild and frightening.

Leaving Academia: Loss, Grief, and Healing

Development, Voluntourism, Study Abroad, and Peace Corps: For Whom?

Development, Voluntourism, Study Abroad, and Peace Corps: For Whom?

Now as the director of a study abroad program, I’m still wrestling with the same kinds of questions I dealt with in my dissertation. I worry about my own culpability and my own responsibility to the people around me. I think about my own Peace Corps service and wonder about what I left behind for people. Did I leave anything of substance or did I just take what I wanted? This time, I’m not the only person whose experience I have to consider; I now have students to guide through these same kinds of unequal encounters and experiences.

Joyful Receiving

Joyful Receiving

Receiving gifts in the form of love, money, success, or abundance makes me feel vulnerable, uncomfortable, and seems sends a secret signal to every single personal gremlin I’ve ever struggled with. When receiving a gift, the gremlins sidle up next to me, demanding to know who the hell I think I am to have X thing. As I’ve written about here, success (and other goodness like joy and love and money) can feel so unfamiliar that the minute we (I) have it, we’re (I’m) throwing it out the window like a hot potato.

Get Ready to Get Inspired AGAIN!

Get Ready to Get Inspired AGAIN!

If you’ve never participated in my online treat (or if you have), you’re in luck! I’m delighted to announce that I’m bringing Inspired back for a new session on July 14, 2018! If you’re on the fence about signing up or you need a reminder about how great it is and why it works, keep reading. A “writing retreat” can sound self-indulgent, but there’s actual research out in the world about how and why the writing retreat model helps people get more writing done and feel better about it. Instead of trying to cram your writing into weird chunks of time and trying to get writing done by yourself, a writing retreat gives you the dedicated time, structure, and community support to do your best work. You might even find yourself having fun!