HeyJaredSTORYTELLHER Substack with Deborah Kevin
STORYTELLHER is for writers, authors, and big-hearted storytellers who crave real talk about the creative process, publishing, and building a sustainable writing life.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Sep 2, 2026
Latest issues
What Will You Tend This Season? (opens the original)
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September has a way of making us ambitious. The school-year energy kicks in, the air changes, fresh notebooks suddenly seem like a sound financial investment, and even those of us who have not had homework in decades begin to feel as though we should be getting organized.There is nothing wrong with that. I love a reset as much as anyone. But as we close out the month and look toward October and beyond, I want to offer a different question.Instead of asking, What can I accomplish?, ask, What do I
Your Writing Life Needs a Firepit (opens the original)
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There is something about a firepit that changes the mood immediately.You pull up a chair, someone adds another log, the air gets cooler, the conversation gets better, and suddenly nobody is in quite as much of a hurry. A firepit creates a little pocket of attention. You know what happens there. You settle in.Writers need that, too.Not necessarily the flames, although I am in favor of anything involving cozy sweaters, hot cider, and a “responsible” quantity of chocolate. What we need are places,
Let It Fall (opens the original)
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Fall is excellent at not overthinking things.The leaves change color, put on one spectacular final show, and then let go. No committee meeting. No five-year strategic plan. No guilt spiral about whether they should have tried harder to stay attached.Writers, meanwhile, can cling to things with impressive dedication.Old criticism. Outgrown goals. Arbitrary deadlines. Advice that stopped being useful somewhere around 2019. The belief that we should write a certain way, publish a certain way, marke
What Are You Carrying That Your Writing Doesn’t Need? (opens the original)
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Earlier this week, I wrote about fall as permission to release what is no longer working: the project you have outgrown, the marketing tactic you dread, the imaginary deadline, the version of yourself you thought an author was supposed to be. Those are usually the things we can point to. They live on calendars, in folders, on task lists, and in abandoned social media accounts.But creative clutter is not always visible. Some of the heaviest things writers carry are old comments, comparisons, assu
The Leaves Know Something We Don’t (opens the original)
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Every fall, trees do something we humans are remarkably bad at: they let go. They do not convene a strategy session about each leaf, cling to branches because those leaves worked so hard to get there, or keep every last one out of guilt, sentimentality, or fear that releasing them might look like failure. They simply respond to the season.There may be something in that for writers, because creative lives accumulate things. Projects, plans, expectations, platforms, deadlines, identities, and stra
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