• Cheryl Strayed and Albert Flynn DeSilver

On June 1, Cheryl Strayed taught a daylong writing and craft workshop in Petaluma. The author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, as well as the voice behind Dear Sugar, the popular advice column on The Rumpus, has a huge following, one that’s grown especially large after Wild was featured on Oprah’s Book Club. Organized by poet Albert Flynn DeSilver, Marin’s first poet laureate and the face behind The Owl Press, the event on a sunny Saturday brought together a few hundred Strayed fans to hear about her process and do a little writing themselves.

So without further adieu, here are:

Ten Things I Learned from Cheryl Strayed.

1. If you have small children (and the money), hotel rooms can be a good place to write. Strayed got Wild written by checking into hotel rooms for 48 hour stretches where she would “write like a motherfucker.” She doesn’t write everyday. She calls herself a “binge writer.” The most important thing is to find time to write, whether it’s everyday, one day a week or in weekend spurts. There’s hope for us Moms yet!

2. Memoir gets a bad rap as narcissistic, but Strayed says that successful memoir is the opposite of narcissism. “You’re transcending the difference between you and me,” she told us. We do this by using self, and the narrative tools of fiction, to create story.

3. How do you write your truth while protecting those you love? “I got to a place where I was genuinely writing about people on the other side of forgiveness,” Strayed said. But it took years of writing to get there, and even then, though her father was abusive, tyrannical and “not a good person,” she woke up “breathless with sorrow” when she thought about him reading what she’d written in Wild. The important idea to try to remember is that the entire picture is often broader and more complex then we realize when we begin writing.

4. People want to read a human story, with all the mistakes, bad choices, ugliness and triumph that comes for all of us at one point or another. Nobody wants to hear about somebody who never makes mistakes, who never shows a shadow self. “Use the places where you rubbed up against yourself,” she said.

5. “Trust however weird you are, a whole bunch of us are just as weird.”

6. Think about the question at the core of your work. For Strayed, whose mother’s death forms the spine of Wild, it grew from “How do I live without my mother?” to “How to bear the unbearable.”

7. Strayed believes in radical honesty, sparing no shadow. She said that most people fear condemnation when they speak their deepest truths, foibles, when they excavate their darkest matter, but rather than being condemned, when people write to the place that makes them uncomfortable, to the point of revelation, that’s when the bridge is crossed between the reader and the writer.

8. She’s all about “Trusting the heat.” “Do it so righteously that we can’t help but look,” she told us. “It’s up to you to make a place for yourself in this world.”

9. It was pretty damn wonderful to see 250 people writing together in one large room.

10. Write what haunts you. What are you obsessed by? What keeps you up at night? Remember, everyone starts out with some kind of handicap and without an audience. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write like a motherfucker. Nobody can (or will) give you permission to do this but yourself.

For years, the media related rhetoric has been: “Print is dead.” The news of the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the closing of the Rocky Mountain News, both in 2009, shook newsrooms to their core.

Online news sites like the Huffington Post, Politico, Patch and Salon have gained popularity and shifted the way people get their news. Newspapers have gotten smaller and there are fewer subscribers. But is it because people don’t want papers? Or just that there isn’t as much money in them and the content is declining?

Last year, New Orleans became the largest U.S. city to not have a daily paper. The Times-Picayune became a three-per-week publication with more focus on the online content. That apparently is not what people want. In an article in the New York Times, reporter David Carr noted the publisher decided to bring back the paper as a daily because of the public engagement. Also, the Philadelphia Inquirer is set to publish again; though only on Saturdays.

Now it is debatable, apparently, whether the method in which New Orleans’ paper is being distributed is a good one. Says Carr:

On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, a broadsheet called The Times-Picayune will be available for home delivery and on the newsstands for 75 cents. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a tabloid called TPStreet will be available only on newsstands for 75 cents.

In addition, a special electronic edition of TPStreet will be available to the three-day subscribers of the home-delivered newspaper. On Saturdays, there will be early print editions of the Sunday Times-Picayune with some breaking news and some Sunday content.

But the public demanded it and they listened.

When I went to J School, everyone I knew said I was studying a dying industry. After all, “Newspaper Reporter” is apparently the worst job out there.

I always argued it was reporting I was studying, not newspaper reporting. And I figured no matter what, there would be a medium for the message. I am sure there will be a day when print is dead—environmentally speaking, it certainly makes more sense to have news delivered electronically. But apparently even today, people argue for print. And while I am a news junkie and look at it online constantly, there is nothing like a cup of coffee and the Sunday New York Times—in print—to make me happy.