For more than thirty years, I’ve worked with writers at the university level, at writing festivals, and one-on-one. My favorite part of teaching has always been reading work, preferably entire books, and talking about it. Now I’m hanging out my shingle for limited (at the moment) manuscript consultations.
What you can expect when you work with me: a close reading of your work, a marked-up manuscript, a Zoom consultation at the end, and a letter. We will talk about character, plot, language, structure, and dialogue, whatever you’re interested in, whatever bedevils you. I charge $20 a page (12 point, one inch margins), no matter the length of the project.
I love prose of all sorts, but my specialty is literary fiction, whatever that means: work that at its heart wants to be literature, no matter what worlds and modes it uses to get there. I love work that is speculative, imaginative, realistic, or not, but I’m not an expert (for instance) in science fiction or romance, though I love to read literary work across genres, including memoir.
If you want to know whether we’re a good fit, or if you have any questions at all, feel free to drop me a line at elizmccrack@gmail.com.
I’ve taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and in the MFA programs at the University of Texas at Austin (the New Writers Project and the Michener Center for Writers), and have won awards for my teaching.
In December 2025, Ecco will publish my book on writing, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. If you’d like to see what some of my former students have to say about me, click here.