Graduate Essay: “What Counts as Writing” by Chloe Smith

Chloe Smith’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Haven Speculative Fiction, Bourbon Penn, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among other places. Her debut novella, Virgin Land, came out from Luna Press Publishing in 2023. She is a graduate of Your Personal Odyssey 2024. When she’s not writing, she works as a middle school teacher librarian. In past incarnations, she’s been a classroom teacher, a proofreader for Locus and Fantasy magazines, a barista, and a ballet dancer. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. You can find more information about her work at https://imaginaryresearch.wordpress.com/, and she is semi-active on Bluesky and Twitter (X) @chloehsmith.

When I step back and try to articulate the impact of Your Personal Odyssey, it feels impossible to distill into a single statement—or even a neat summary. The experience was just that rich and intense. I learned so much, swallowed down so many lessons about craft, technique, and the nature of my own work, that even now, months later, I’m still taking stock of the resulting growth. It reshaped my relationship to my writing practice.

Perhaps, then, I can evaluate my experience by looking at the new breadth of my practice: Odyssey changed my understanding of what counts as writing.

Before Odyssey, I was approaching stasis. I had sold stories, had written a novel manuscript, had participated in enough classes and critique exchanges to feel as if I knew what I was doing—but I felt stuck. My word counts were dribbling shorter and shorter with each writing session. I had a vague sense of what I wanted for my current project, but I didn’t know how to achieve it.

Enter Jeanne Cavelos and the Your Personal Odyssey program. Jeanne is an amazing teacher. I’ve seen a lot of teaching (my day job has been in public school classrooms for the last twelve years) and I have strong feelings about pedagogy: it’s an important set of professional skills, distinct from expertise in any particular content area. Jeanne has both. On top of her vast, passionate knowledge of everything from narrative structure to genre conventions to language mechanics and style, she has the ability to zero in on where her students are—and then push them further. Jeanne brought those insights to my work through her incisive, immensely detailed written critiques and the one-on-one sessions that provide the backbone of the Odyssey program. It wasn’t so much that she shone light on my weaknesses, but that she was always focused on helping me strengthen, suggesting things for me to try and do.

And I did a lot. Your Personal Odyssey was six weeks of pressure-cooker intensity: I read and analyzed exemplar stories; critiqued others’ work; took frantic notes on hours of lectures; tried new exercises and techniques for brainstorming, drafting, and revision; wrote reflections (so many reflections!) about my process and how I could take it further.

I knew I would work hard at Odyssey, but I didn’t fully appreciate how I would work. It wasn’t just the accelerated pace and the sustained critical, creative effort. It was the fact that Jeanne asked me to expand my idea of the writer I wanted to be, and then set about helping me get there.

Before Odyssey, I thought that writing meant getting the words down, that practice meant putting in the time to work through ideas and generate stories. Odyssey showed me how much more writing entails. Yes, there’s a time for putting your pen or keyboard where your mouth is, hammering out sentences one after another until the you have something there that wasn’t there before—and I did plenty of that at Odyssey. But drafting doesn’t work without all the other parts. The exercises to boost creativity, help you organize your thoughts, and steer you through iterative revisions. The critical study of other writers’ work. The development of self-awareness—knowing what you do well, what you struggle with, and what you want to improve. Journaling counts as writing. Brainstorms count as writing. Critiques count as writing. Everything that helps you grow closer to telling the stories you want to tell counts as writing.

Odyssey showed me that writing is an ongoing apprenticeship. I graduated from the program, but I’m still trying to apply everything I learned there. That’s the process: continuing to build and reflect on my learning, putting in the time and energy to grow into the writer I want to be. I now understand my writing practice includes everything germane to that growth—and Odyssey gave me the tools to build on that understanding. I am (and will continue to become) a different writer because of Odyssey. That counts for a lot.

Interested in Your Personal Odyssey? Visit https://www.odysseyworkshop.org/about-the-workshop/ for more information, and stay tuned to find out when applications for the 2026 sessions will open!