Grow Your Writing with Lena
Lena Crown (she/her) is a writer, editor, and educator from Northern California with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University. Her essays have been published in Guernica, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Narratively, North American Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her fiction appears in Joyland, and her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and have appeared in Couplet, Bellevue Literary Review, The Boiler, Poet Lore, No Contact, and Variant Lit. She is currently working on an essay collection and a memoir about young adulthood in the Midwest.
Lena has years of experience editing both short- and longform nonfiction work for literary journals and book presses. She helmed the nonfiction section of phoebe from 2021-22, and she led craft workshops and editorial sessions for years at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She edits autobiographical writing for Autofocus Books, including Kristine Langley-Mahler’s A Calendar Is a Snakeskin, a triptych of lyric essays, and E.N. Couturier’s Organic Matter, a fragmentary, voice-driven memoir about working on a farm.
Lena has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. In 2022, she served as the PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence in Washington, D.C. She also managed the Author’s Corner Program for The Inner Loop, a literary nonprofit and reading series that celebrates the work of D.C. writers and forges connections between writers, readers, indie bookstores, and community members. Last year, she received the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in nonfiction at Colgate University, where she taught two semesters of creative nonfiction. Lena is a deeply passionate teacher, mentor, and champion of her students’ work. She has taught creative nonfiction, multi-genre creative writing, and literature for students at all levels and life stages, and she now produces, edits and hosts Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts, where she interviews writers who matter to one another about their collaboration.
Work with Lena
Apply to join the mentor’s small group of writers that they will lead through our unique 12 week mentoring and workshopping program.
Decide if Lena is Right for You with Our Mentor Interview
What excites you most about writing?
“It takes me a long time to know what I think, and often even longer to understand how I feel, but writing—especially in nonfiction, my primary genre—has always helped to bring my suspicions into focus. I find that various forms of nonfiction have taught me to approach the world (and my own voice in the world) in different ways, but research is a constant: I might start writing with a hunch, but the real writing begins for me after I’ve deeply engaged with other perspectives that inevitably reshape my own. For his reason, it’s hard for me to talk about both what excites me about writing and how it’s affected my life without talking about reading; I always read someone else’s work before sitting down to write, and chewing on a surprising sentence reminds me of my own capacity to surprise myself,” Lena said.
What mindset does a writer need to grow?
“It sounds simple, but I believe in writing not because you want to tell someone something, but rather because you want to understand something. Leading with a question—or finding the question in the story—naturally positions you with a sense of curiosity and humility toward your subject, even if that subject is your own experience.
I’ve also really come to value radical revision. It can feel scary to treat your drafts as entirely malleable, to accept that the crux of a piece could be elaborated in wildly different forms. Taking revision seriously lengthened my writing process by quite a bit. But once I stopped clinging to my first attempts, I felt free to experiment with form and to explore the outer reaches of my ideas, producing work whose final form I have reasons to stand behind.”
What three words best describe you as a mentor?
“Enthusiastic, compassionate, intuitive.”
What makes a good writing mentor?
“My most formative writing mentors have been highly perceptive, intuitive people, and I think the ability to identify what a writer is minimizing or hiding from is important, perhaps especially in nonfiction, to encourage the writing that feels most rigorous and true. To make that possible, of course, the relationship has to be founded on deep listening and trust. Essentially, I think a good writing mentor is first and foremost an attentive reader and a good listener, and someone who both helps their mentee realize their own goals for their writing and helps them see what they might not have thought was possible.”
What is your style of feedback?
“I always like to begin with what I believe is working in a draft: what themes I’m noticing; what intrigues me about the questions the piece is posing; what characters or craft elements are particularly compelling. When presenting areas for revision or expansion, I always ask lots of questions. These questions will, I hope, alert the writer to areas of ambiguity or confusion and generate new possibilities. I’m a big fan of “what if” questions: what if this section came later in the piece? What if the narrator’s mother really stepped into the foreground rather than loitering in the periphery? What might this do, in other words, to more effectively and incisively communicate what the piece is “really about”? My feedback style necessarily adapts based on the demands of a given draft, however, and the degree of directiveness a writer prefers.”
What was the most recent "standout" book you read?
“I recently fell in love with Tash Aw’s The South, an ambient family drama about a queer teenager set in a rapidly changing Malaysia and told from the perspectives of several characters. I am always drawn to books in which the setting is both a character and an organizing logic, since I’m fascinated by how our environments influence our psyches and shape our experiences. Though it’s a novel, I found much to learn about nonfiction in the book, including the languid structure of time in the narrative and the way tone can act as an engine rather than plot. I need the reminder every so often that anything can be interesting when written about in an interesting way, and this book reminded me how much I love reading (and writing) to make a particular world or period of time feel real to myself, and to better understand what made it possible.”