Rhona Berens is a life coach extraordinaire. We should know–we’ve worked with her, as have many “creatives.” She’s also got a background in film, screenwriting and writing for television, and writes poetry and other forms as well–so she was the perfect guest for Story Makers. She laid out some key ideas about prioritization, and explained “saboteurs”–the parts of ourselves that bring voices of fear and judgement into our lives and art–and how to work with them. We discussed how to make your intuitive a voice as powerful and heard as the voices of your fear and negative consequences. Listening to the voice that says, “I’ve got a story to tell” and some tools to support that voice to thrive. At the end of the episode we touched on subtext. If you are ready to transform your relationship to your creativity, your writing, your story making, or the necessary self-promotion, this is the episode for you.

Links and Books Discussed:
How to Be Both by Allie Smith


Puffy Chair, a film by the Duplass brothers

Einstein’s Cosmos

Rhona’s website is http://www.fortedreams.com/

Link to article by Rhona about how to remove some roadblocks to promoting ourselves as writers: http://bit.ly/1MRnHQv

Rhona Berens

Rhona Berens

Rhona presents her bio as stories about herself, and they are each wonderful and add more to the last, so check out this conversation and her website if you want to know more beyond:

My Professional Story (a.k.a. What Some of the Letters After My Name Mean): My degrees from McGill University and UCLA are in Communications & Media Studies. I worked at UC-Irvine for close to a decade, where I earned tenure, chaired my department, served as Director of the Professional Film & TV Internship Program, and taught a range of courses, like Performance in Film & TV.

I eventually left academia for business and held VP posts in Strategic Marketing at Online Partners; Client Services & Customer Care at PlanetOut Partners; and Business & Community Development at PeoplesMD. I’ve also worked as a Business Consultant focused on customer experience.  What are the favorite roles I played in this part of my story? Teacher, mentor, advisor, which lead me to…

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.