Marcus Joseph

I am a Trinidadian-American writer who spent the first twelve years of my adult life trying to figure out where I belonged. I worked at a bank for three years and hated it. I worked at a media company for four years and was decent at it but not who I was. I went to graduate school for an MFA at thirty and learned, finally, what I had been trying to do all along: write about the inside of my own life and the lives of the men I came up with, in a way that did not flinch and did not show off.

I now coach men through the work of writing about their own lives. The men I work with are not, mostly, professional writers. They are men with a project — a memoir, a long essay, a series of letters to their children, a book that has been stuck for years — and the project matters to them more than they have been able to act on. The coaching work is the work of moving from 'I want to write this' to actually writing it, finishing it, and being able to read it aloud at the end without flinching.

I structure the work in four-session arcs. The first session is a long conversation about the project — what it is, what it is not, who it is for, what scares you about writing it. The second session is a structural session — we map the shape of the piece together and agree on what you will write for the third session. The third session is a craft session — we read what you wrote and work on the sentences. The fourth session is a finishing session — we look at what is needed to complete the piece and we plan how you will finish on your own.

I do not write for my clients. I read what they write and I tell them where the writing is working and where it is not, with specifics rather than generalities. I have learned over years that men who write about their own lives tend to fail in similar ways. They abstract when they should be specific. They explain when they should describe. They hold something back that they should put on the page if the piece is going to do its work. The coaching is the work of catching those failures early and helping you write through them.

The identity work is part of the writing work. Men who write about their lives end up writing about their identities — about being Black, about being a son, about being a father, about being a brother in the diaspora story — whether they planned to or not. Some of my clients come in with the identity questions front and center. Some come in with a craft project and find the identity questions waiting underneath. Either way, we handle them with the same care we handle the sentences themselves.

My rate is seventy-five dollars per hour. The four-session arc is three hundred dollars total. We meet by video. I am based in Brooklyn but my clients are across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and the continent. Sessions are in English. I read drafts up to ten thousand words at a time. I respond to short emails between sessions but I am not your editor between arcs.

I am especially glad to work with brothers who have never been in writing instruction before. The graduate MFA world is largely closed to most men who have full lives and full jobs and cannot take three years off to study writing. That should not be the only path to doing this work well. The work can be done in evenings and weekends, in four-session arcs over a few months, with a coach who has been where you are. If you have a project that has been sitting too long, write to me. Let us talk about whether this work is for you.