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What if there’s no such thing as good writing?
That’s one of the central questions that Helen Betya Rubinstein poses in her new book on writing, Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching, and Power. Part craft book, part memoir about writing education, and part polemic, Helen’s book pushes readers to take a sharp look at how we teach and talk about writing and what motivates us to write in the first place. I’ve read a lot of craft books, and this one was a shot in the arm.
Back in 2024, Helen joined me on the Drafting the Past podcast to talk about her work as a writing coach, especially with academics and historians. Helen is also the author of The Case Against Rubinstein, a memoir in the form of a trial against herself, forthcoming in 2027, and a booklet of lyric fictions. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, and Jewish Currents, and awarded multiple fellowships. Helen is a writing coach and a professor at The New School.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Kate Carpenter: I want to start by asking what motivated you to write this.
Helen Betya Rubinstein: There are two answers. One is, this particular publisher came to me and asked if I wanted to write a book with them, and that's a longer story. The other answer is that I had been making notes on the teaching of writing for a really long time. When I moved to Iowa for my second MFA, I started a folder on my computer called “Dispatches from the Second MFA,” and I never really did anything with it except for a few essays I published that might have had their seeds in there. It was always kind of a side thing, like, oh, it would be nice to do something with this one day. Because those notes were often squirrely or cranky about the way that things are typically done, they felt like a good fit for a small press that was working independently of big publishers, or a university press that wasn’t exactly like a lot of the university presses I'm more familiar with. So when UNO came and asked me, it just felt like the right fit.
KC: I got so much out of reading this book that even though I have a digital ARC, I ended up pre-ordering a copy because I'm going to need to mark it up and come back to it. I have a lot of writing craft books—too many probably—and your book is a sort of non-traditional craft book. There is writing advice in it, but there's also some memoir and accounts of other people's experiences. And sometimes we're just sort of like feeling together what this all is like. That might sound a little odd on the surface as a writing book, and yet in the end, it felt more useful to me in some ways than a more traditional writing book. How did you think about putting this together?
