We’re looking forward to introducing you to Judy Reeves. Check out our conversation below.
Good morning Judy, we’re so happy to have you here with us and we’d love to explore your story and how you think about life and legacy and so much more. So let’s start with a question we often ask: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
We’ll skip the first few minutes of transition between sleep and ready-for-the-day arrival in the kitchen where I fill the pot with water for my tea (English Breakfast) and light the candle on the table. Usually by the time the water is boiling, my landlord’s dog, Rocky, has arrived on my porch and awaits his morning treat. I like to watch him climb up the stairs—he usually has an anticipatory grin on his otherwise regal face.
Treat for Rocky, my hands washed from his juicy appreciation, I settle in at the table with my tea and open whatever book I am reading for morning inspiration. These days it is another reading of “Dancing for Joy–99 Poems,” edited by Roger Housden. Reading something uplifting or inspiring is a necessary part of my daily ritual. Another book I recently reread was Ross Gay’s “The Book of (More) Delights.” I need such reminders these troubled days.
Next comes the journaling, a practice that’s been part of my mornings for at least three decades. I open to a blank page, date it and begin. Most often I don’t know what I’m going to write about and the first lines sometimes record what I see outside my window—birds arriving at the feeders in downstairs the yard, squirrels scurrying along the fence or on the neighbor’s roof, tightrope scampering on the wiring that runs alley to apartment.
Three or more journal pages later—sometimes filled with ramblings and wonderings, sometimes with to-do lists and concerns, I’m off to my desk in the next room. More windows to look out and next part of the day to enter into.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m a writer and teacher and lead workshops and writing groups in person and virtually, most often in San Diego but also writing conferences across the country and internationally. One of my favorite things is writing in community with other writers, something I started doing three decades ago when I founded The Writing Center, a nonprofit literary organization. A few years after The Writing Center closed, I co-founded San Diego Writers, Ink, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. I’m also a committed journal keeper and am on the council of the International Association for Journal Writing. (IAJW), an inclusive community I recommend for all who are journal writers.
My publishing journey includes four books on the writing craft including “A Writer’s Book of Days,” and “Wild Women, Wild Voices” (New World Library), and most recently, a memoir, “When Your Heart Says Go” (She Writes Press, 2023). My prose and poetry has appeared in various publications both print and online.
Both the literary organizations I started and the craft books I’ve written have as a basis, community which shows in virtually all the work I do. I’ve often said the Muse likes to work a crowd. We may do the actual writing alone—just us and our notebooks or us and our laptops, but the community supports us, encourages us, nurtures us, teaches us, and mentors us. I’ve been writing in community since I was a little girl and formed my first writing group with my best friend; I’ve been doing it ever since.
In addition to the craft workshops and various groups I lead, I have fun creating occasions when writers of all stripe can come together to write. Each quarter I invite others to some location outside the classroom to celebrate the change of seasons through Equinox and Solstice retreats. This summer, San Diego Writers, Ink Executive Director Kristen Fogle and I created “Writers in Weird Places,” a ten-day road trip, San Diego to Ashland, OR. We stopped along the way too offer virtual writing workshops in all manner of “weird” places such as a cadaver dissection lab, a cat hotel, the Antique Vibrator Museum, and an animal sanctuary. (You can follow our journey on the “Writers in Weird Places Road Trip Facebook page). Stay tuned; more are planned as are some other surprises.
While I love teaching and bringing writers together to write and share our stories, I am working on a couple of projects—one a novel, and one a collection of short micro-memoir pieces based on the eight ragtops I’ve owned in my life. The working title: “Top Down, Music Up.” We writers will never run out of stories to tell.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. Who saw you clearly before you could see yourself?
I am in third grade, eight years old, learning to spell. Our assignment was to write a sentence using the words from our spelling test. Carrot was one of the words. I loved carrots (still do). which might have inspired the sentence I wrote, something about a rabbit and a carrot. I liked my sentence, and I liked writing it. One afternoon my teacher, Mrs. Chairs, stood at the front of the class holding my paper and said, “Listen to what Judy wrote.” And she read my sentence aloud. What a feeling I had then. I wrote something that I liked, and my teacher liked it too and she wanted others to hear it.
I am in sixth grade, twelve years old. My teacher, Mrs. Cunningham, called me to her desk. Am I in trouble? I couldn’t imagine why. “Judy, how would you like to be editor of our class newspaper?” she asked. Would I? I could hardly contain my excitement. A newspaper. Just like my heroine, Brenda Starr, Reporter.
I am in eleventh grade, sixteen years old. My teacher, Mrs. Gatos, asked me to stay after class. Again, trouble? “Judy, I sent one of your poems to a teacher who is organizing a city-wide writing workshop, and he wants you to be part of it,” she told me. “Yes! Yes!” Mrs. Gatos, the teacher who introduced me to E.E. Cummings, and other poets I still love today. My first “real” writing workshop.
These three teachers saw something in me I couldn’t name yet—that I was a writer. Their encouragement didn’t just shape my career; it taught me how transformative it is when someone sees your potential before you do. That’s why I eventually became a writing teacher myself, wanting to be that person for others.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
This is the question every writer working with personal material must eventually answer.
I’ve been a journal writer my whole life. The journal is where talk to myself and ask questions. I write memories and my response to them. All in my “private voice,” writing not intended to be read by others. Consequently, I often write about things that have caused me pain. I remember this entry specifically: Standing beside my father’s hospital bed, I was suddenly that little girl again, afraid of losing daddy. Writing this was difficult—being honest, feeling the pain again as I wrote the words. But the privacy of my journal allowed me to say it.
The shift from private processing to “public voice” came when I realized that the very experiences I’d been examining in my journal—the pain I’d been hiding from—held the potential to resonate with others. Ultimately, I wrote a story for a publication about losing my father and related the vulnerable feeling of being that scared little girl again. Admitting to the pain, the difficulties, the grief, allowed me to be vulnerable, and ultimately empowered me to become more authentic, which resonated in my writing.
When I began allowing my authentic voice to emerge, drawing on those private reflections in my journals and transforming them into stories others could enter, I discovered the power your question asks about: not hiding anymore, but offering. My personal story can become a universal story.
Each time I choose honesty over hiding, I find my voice grows stronger—and the responses from readers tell me they hear themselves in my words. My experience tells me the more honest and authentic we are with ourselves, the more we’re able to translate our experiences into stories others can relate to.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. What would your closest friends say really matters to you?
I want to believe that I have lived my life honestly and authentically so what I say and what I do and how I present myself in the world represents what I truly believe in, and that my friends recognize the me I want to be and believe myself to be.
If I were to guess, I think my closest friends would say that what matters to me is creating community and bringing people together. What matters to me is creating a time and space and experience that allows us to support and encourage and inspire others, and where we feel safe to express ourselves in our work, in our play, in our struggles and challenges, and in our humanity. It’s within such communities that I have found some of my closest friends.
A second thing would be writing. And not just writing, but creativity of all kinds. It matters to me that each of us finds the creative expression that is our gift and that uplifts us and is a way we can contribute truth and beauty to the world. This is a place of deep friendships for me, too.
And then there’s play and fun and bringing these together in a creative way that includes laughter and good humor and inclusiveness.
My closest friends might also mention coffee and road trips.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. If immortality were real, what would you build?
I do believe immortality is real, not for all individuals and specifically not for me, but for what I have been contributing to and building the last three decades of my life.
I’ve told this story before: One chilly night in November 1992, the little studio above a garage I’d taken as a writing space was especially cold. To warm my bones, I drew a steamy bath, lit a few candles to fragrance up the misty air, and climbed in. Leaning back and uttering that sigh that always comes, I closed my eyes. Ahh.
Suddenly! And it was just like that – suddenly! I was struck with an idea so clear and so complete and so powerful that its arrival literally knocked a candle from the edge of the tub and into my bath.
Open a writing center!
More specific: create a place where writers of all kinds can come together in community and support each other and work together.
Less than a year later, The Writing Center, a literary nonprofit organization was born in a live-work space in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter and in November 1993, we commenced the first writing session. The Writing Center had a short five-year life, but because of the community that had been built and sustained during those five years, the spirit of the place continued through individuals who kept it alive even though it had lost its physical being. Then, in 2004, with the support and encouragement of many volunteers from that original community, San Diego Writers, Ink was born. It is alive and lively today and I’m honored to be a part of this organization and this community.
I believe through the ongoing work of this collection of creative individuals, keepers of this legacy—the writers, instructors, artistic partners, and generous supporters, San Diego Writers, Ink will continue to live its mission—to nurture writers and foster a literary community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.judyreeveswriter.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/judyreeveswriter/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/judyreevestoo
