“Meet the Teacher” offers a quick introduction to the talented writers who teach for The Porch. Today we welcome Vanessa Mártir, an upstate New York-based multigenre writer and the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop; the Writing the Mother Wound Movement, and most recently the Write Your Abortion Story class. Vanessa has been widely published including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Longreads, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Aster(ix) Journal, and the New York Times' bestselling anthology Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay, among others.

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Tell us about a book you've recently read and enjoyed.

Tessa Hulls' graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts. I was introduced to this graphic memoir this past summer at the start of a monthlong residency at Storyknife in Homer, Alaska. I spent the next three weeks with it, reading it slowly, taking it in. It shifted some things in my memoir, made me really pay attention and dig into some history I’d skimmed over. History that’s important to my family’s and my story. I learned Hulls got the 2025 Pulitzer for this book. She deserved it! It’s gorgeous and wrenching.

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What’s one book or essay you return to again and again to help you think about writing, get inspired, etc.?

Only one?! Impossible!

Essay: Ocean Vuong’s A Letter to My  Mother That She Will Never Read

Book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Also, anything and everything by Hanif Abdurraqib

They remind me why poets are some of my favorite essayists. What they do with metaphor is astounding. How they see the world is glorious.

What is your favorite writing rule to break?

Sentence fragments. Poets have taught me the effectiveness of a line break at the right time to spotlight a sentence (which is often a fragment) and break up rhythm.

This is why I tell my prose-writing students: Read poetry!

(You should know I am the prose writer who hangs out with the poets at conferences, residencies, etc.)

Music while writing: Y/N?

Depends. Yes to music when I am conjuring a character and/or a specific memory…

When I am writing about Millie, the butch who raised me, I might listen to old school salsa romantica, something by Lalo Rodriguez or Frankie Ruiz.

When I am bringing my mother into the room, it’s Juan Gabriel or Camilo Sesto, and immediately I am back in our first floor apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Ma is mopping the house. I smell the King Pine swirling around her. She stops, closes her eyes, sways her body as she sings. To this day, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and one of the most pained.

But if I’m editing a story or revising, all I need are the sounds of nature outside my window or some jazz or classical, nothing with words…

What do you love most about teaching writing?

Sharing my love for craft.

Seeing writers light up when they have an epiphany or write something surprising that they know has heat. <~I love witnessing this!

Being part of the birthing process of artmaking.

For you, why does creative writing matter?

I am one of those foolish people who believes story can help change the world. Give an issue a face and a story, and that is what connects to our humanity, evokes emotion, inspires action.

Through storytelling and story-making, we explore the world and make meaning, and get to know ourselves and others.

We’re all narrative makers. There’s a reason for that—it’s how we make sense of the world and how we place ourselves in it. It’s also how we can make something absolutely devastating into something beautiful.

Tell us why you pitched your upcoming class or classes.

I’m always thinking of new ways to write about and excavate our lives.  There are entry ways, doors, like food & music & pop culture.

I love making soup. I call it sopa ministry. It reminds me of my mother, who didn’t know how to apologize. Instead she’d send me Tupperware full of my favorite soup—a Honduran sopa de frijoles. She never gave me the recipe, but now that she’s been gone two years, I’m finally ready to try making it myself.

All this is to say that there’s something about food that I think is an especially expansive door to story writing. I’m always surprised by what scents and tastes can do to our memories, to developing characters and relationships, and to conjuring emotion. We’ll dig into that in my upcoming class, "Writing Deliciously."

Share something that has inspired your creativity lately, other than a book.  

I never thought myself a visual artist despite being a years-long collage maker. In January I started doodling and it’s become an enormous part of my process. The color, shapes, letting my mind and hand run free, have really shaken things up. I’ve also managed to create some vibrant art. Who knew?

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Thanks, Vanessa! On Wednesdays from Oct. 29 to Nov. 14, Vanessa Mártir will teach "Writing Deliciously (Food Writing)."

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