In Progress:

Getting Your Book DONE

Girl w/ Pen’s Deborah Siegel
Girl with Pen’s Deborah Siegel is back with Version 2.0 of her popular
Making It Pop: Translating Your Ideas for Trade bloginar. Have you
successfully tackled the book proposal but are struggling to find the right
structure for your book, themes for your chapters, or hooks and anecdotes to
draw the reader in? With In Progress: Getting Your Book DONE Deborah will
take you beyond the book proposal and into the process of writing your first
book.
Significant contributions too often get lost or discarded because of the difficulties involved in
crafting and completing a book for popular consumption. But the input of women’s studies
scholars and researchers is critical in order to complicate oversimplified debate and frame public
commentary on modern women’s lives. Are you writing a book but lacking an author’s
community? A writers’ group and the advice of someone who’s done it all before can aid you to
overcome writer’s block or plain old frustration with structure and content. Having turned
university research into a popular book on the fights and frenzies around U.S. feminism across
two generations, Deborah has hit all the stumbling blocks and along the way has learned a
number of tricks for overcoming them. She is ready to share them with you.
In Progress is a five-week hands-on seminar and author-led writer’s group for those in the middle
of writing their first books for the public. The teleconference/bloginar is designed to help
researchers, scholars, policy “wonks” and others brainstorm, structure, and work out the details
for their first publications.

Deborah Siegel, PhD is a writer and consultant specializing in women’s issues. She is the author of Sisterhood,
Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave Macmillan). She has written about women, sex,
feminism, contemporary families, and popular culture for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The
Huffington Post, TheAmerican Prospect, Psychology Today, The Progressive, The Mothers Movement Online, and
on her blog, Girl with Pen.With Daphne Uviller, Siegel co-edited the literary anthology, Only Child: Writers on the
Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo (Random House, 2007).
Siegel consults with a range of organizations that link research on women and girls’ lives to media and policy,
including the National Council for Research on Women, the National Women’s Studies Association, Catalyst, the
Council on Contemporary Families, and the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, where she is currently a Fel-
low. Siegel is co-founder of the webjournal, The Scholar & Feminist Online, which she launched while a Fellow at
the Barnard Center for Research on Women in 2003. Siegel received her doctorate in English and American Litera-
ture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001.
 In Progress: The Rundown
This course will offer:
• Exchanges with professionals in the field and your chance to ask those
questions that have been plaguing you.
• Strategies for getting unblocked in the middle of Chapter Four
• Tips for crafting introductions and conclusions for the popular reader
• Workshops on playing with structure, chapter titles, and format

To book In Progress or for more information,

contact Kristen Loveland at Kristen.Loveland@gmail.com

Guest instructors from the publishing industry will share their expertise each week.
Past instructors have included:
Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, published by Penguin Press in 2006,
and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic Monthly.
Laura Mazer, an editor and book consultant who has worked with publishers including Seal Press,Counterpoint
Books, Soft Skull Press, Avalon Publishing Group, and Random House
Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language and a freelance
journalist who has written for The New Yorker,The New York Times, Discover, Slate, and Salon, as well as other
publications.
Tracy Brown, president of the Tracy Brown Literary Agency.
Amanda Moon, an editor at Basic Books and formerly an editor at Palgrave.

In the news...
“No relocating for jobs. No publishing articles in journals only academics read (O.K., maybe a bit of
that here and there.) Instead, [Deborah Siegel] divides her time among blogging, writing books and
articles for the popular press, consulting to women’s research organizations and using all manner of digital
tools to spread her ideas and teach other brainy folks how to do the same.”
-Marci Alboher, “Even Academics Can Be Free Agents,” New York Times

“Publishing in Women’s Studies: A Public Voice had professors with roller bags postponing flights
and scribbling furiously on their notepads as Deborah Siegel described her journey from doctoral
candidate at the University of Wisconsin to New York public intellectual and author of the 2007
book “Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild” (Palgrave) about infighting,
both historical and contemporary, within the feminist movement.”
-Courtney Martin, “Women’s Studies Writers Vie for More Media Turf,” Women’s E News