Click on the video above to hear about Tobie’s experience with Writer’s Relief!

Meet our featured client, Tobie Shapiro! Like many writers, Tobie felt brave enough to write and wanted to share her stories, but didn’t feel so brave about tackling hours of research, dealing with the submissions process—or facing the possibility of rejection. Enter Writer’s Relief! With the right support system, Tobie has been published or has work forthcoming in American Writers Review, Bluestem, and Santa Fe Writers Project, just to name a few.

Read on and watch the video to hear how Writer’s Relief helped Tobie realize she didn’t have to face it all alone, and that she could overcome her fear of rejection and get her stories and essays published.

In Tobie’s Own Words

The older I get (and I can get pretty old), I find it a relief to divest myself of the burdensome internal directive that I should be able to do everything and do it well. I am good at a lot of things, but I’m just not good at selling myself, and I’m not good at taking rejection.

Writing is a strength and I’m awfully brave with what I write, but I tremble before the process of getting my writing out there into the world. Organizing a filing system, sending things out on a regular basis, doing the research into the opportunities for publication—it’s just not going to happen. When I was younger, I chastised myself for that. I told myself I was weak, timid, disorganized, and somehow sabotaging myself. So of course, my writing piled up on shelves, going nowhere. That’s a lot of time wasted on self-loathing, don’t you think?

Since I connected with Writer’s Relief, none of that is an issue anymore. They do all the things I’m rotten at, and they do them well. Now I’m at enough of a distance from all that roiling risk-taking that the rejections don’t even bother me. I can concentrate on the acceptances!

More About Tobie

Tobie Shapiro is a composer and cellist who has also worked as a visual artist, cartoonist, graphologist, and professional chef. She was a columnist for the East Bay Phoenix and has also been published or has work forthcoming in Entropy, Songwriter Magazine, The Monthly, The Penmen Review, Pisgah Review, The Coachella Review, and in the anthology Fire in the Hills: A Collective Remembrance (1992). Tobie has attended numerous writing conferences with The Opening and studied with Andy Couturier. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her family.