Creative advising for unconventional, multi-passionate writers and artists.

A selfie of Siloh in a room with floral wallpaper

Creative advising is a vehicle for spacious, constructive guidance that honors the uniqueness of your work and your way of working. These one-on-one sessions yield greater clarity about your process and equip you with strategies that are practical, creative, and designed to be used on your own terms.

Bring whatever you’re making, doing, or thinking about—your charged cross-genre manuscript, your desire for a creative routine, your website, your hope that file maintenance will stop standing in the way of your publishing goals (ugh), your super-specific organizational system involving four different planners—and we’ll collaborate to keep things moving in a way that feels good.

Book a session

Creative advising session

$175

75-minute session devoted to your creative work and practice, strategizing around any stuck points, and clarifying your next steps. You’ll set the focus for the session based on your goals. We’ll collaboratively explore your ideas and I’ll offer tangible guidance around moving the work forward, removing blockages, and finding balance in the process.

To schedule, contact Siloh using the form below.

Together, we can:

  • Move through blockages in your relationship with your work and creativity.

  • Gain clarity about your work’s focus and form.

  • Strategize around sequence, form, and genre.

  • Develop tangible tools and frameworks you can use to bring your work to life (or to bring more creativity into daily life).

  • Clarify the connections between elements of a project and hone in on its center of gravity.

  • Figure out your next steps, including (but not limited to!) steps towards publication.

  • Tap into your deepest motivation for your project or practice, and consider how to sustain that connection.

Testimonials

  • “In class and in one-on-one coaching, Siloh held a supportive space for creative exploration and offered techniques and perspectives that opened my mind to new possibilities and grounded me in why I started writing in the first place. I highly recommend her services to anyone who is seeking support in their writing life.”

    -Cy Ozgood

  • "Siloh has an incredibly supportive, non-judgmental presence. Her passion for working with words immediately melted my fears that my unimpressive work-in-progress would be an awkward imposition. I was having difficulty editing my own work, but instead of pulling out a red pen and going to town on my word count, she engaged me in a conversation about my intentions with the piece, getting to the root of what was most important to me to convey and why. She helped me get to a place of clarity that then allowed me to focus my writing in much improved ways, and to let go of what was least helpful to me. I benefited greatly from her discernment between what was simply well-written versus what would be most impactful. Her creative writing exercises and gentle guidance helped me approach my writing from a place of greater confidence and gifted me the ability to vision paths forward when I was struggling with serious bouts of writer's block. I was critical that writing support services could feel genuinely worthwhile, but reaching out to Siloh for help was the best decision I made in a time of vulnerability and insecurity with my work."

    — Danny S.

  • “Siloh ushered me from a hellhole of utter stuckness to a complete draft of my thesis by suggesting (and holding me to) a lower stakes daily writing process. With the help of Siloh's accountability emails, I was able to get immediate help with writing problems and be in relationship with my creativity rather than demanding sentences from it like some kind of a word factory. Thank you Siloh!”

    — M. Ryan

  • “Siloh makes complex and overwhelming things feel accessible and like a fun puzzle instead of something frightening. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the ways in which you broke down topics and offered models and examples, and I truly appreciate the ways you make writing feel like something we all deserve and we all can do.”

    — Kate Litterer, PhD

By approaching the creative process holistically, we’ll tend to your work from multiple angles while honing its focus.

I am especially excited about supporting work which incorporates:

  • Research (or criticism) with personal experience

  • Unconventional form

  • Literary prose (especially nonfiction, including lyric or braided essays)

  • Narrative strategy

  • Explorations of illness or care

I also love working with individuals who feel drawn to write but don’t have a lot of previous (or positive) experience with it, and supporting high-stakes writing (such as grad school applications).

My philosophy

All writing entails a negotiation with the unknown.

Writing can be messy. This is especially true if you’re working outside the bounds of genre or are trying new things. I bring years of experience with unconventional forms and interdisciplinary thinking to my coaching practice. Whether you’re working in explicitly experimental or hybrid/cross-genre forms, merging personal experience with research or criticism, or trying to figure out what exactly is going on in a project, we can work together to shift from ambiguity and overwhelm to clarity and definition. I provide nonjudgemental and patient—but critically-minded—guidance, as we work together to bring form to your ideas (and your creative practice more broadly).


We can make complicated ideas and complicated stories legible without oversimplifying them.

One of my passions is identifying the through-line in complex writing projects and strategizing narrative or formal approaches that best serve them. There’s a misconception that doing without genre conventions necessarily results in obscurity and illegibility, or that there’s not space for experimentation in conventional genres. I believe that, instead, we can construct forms that both hold space for complexity and are accessible to our audiences. I love bringing literary tools drawn from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to bear on a wide range of styles and genres, and giving writers tangible strategies they can use to move through the creative process and compose the piece that best serves their vision.

Our creative work wakes us up to our experience of the world, and gives us new ways of connecting with it.

I have experienced firsthand the transformative impact of crafting experiences and ideas into literary form—or even just of getting them down on the page. My writing practice has taught me so much about being a the person I want to be, and has helped me grow and change in ways I am incredibly grateful for. While my focus as a writing coach is on craft and content, I do approach the writing process holistically. We can explore and identify any blockages that are getting in your way whether they are rooted in craft, form, or your relationship to the writing itself. I am invested in attending to the overlap between personal growth and creative practice.

At the same time, I am also passionate about helping writers share their work with the audiences they aspire to be in conversation with. Particularly in coaching sessions and packages which include feedback on written work, I will be honest about legibility and suggest steps towards the publication goals which a writer has specifically outlined. I see this step of the process—putting our work out there—as something which can be approached with integrity and gentleness. I also love working with writers on self-expression and writing which is very decidedly not for publication.

A chalkboard which says "Tools -- organization" and lists in bullet points: cut and paste; plot points -- diff possibilities; "What does reader need to know?"; and Part 1 --> ending (what happens here?)

In addition to my experiences as a writer and artist, my coaching practice draws on over eight years of teaching experience—my work teaching creative writing and composition at UC San Diego, my work at the Writing Center at Evergreen (including facilitating a writing tutor training program), and with designing and implementing an expressive writing project for AYA cancer patients with an interdisciplinary team at Rady Children’s Hospital. I also bring my studies and workshop experiences in cross-genre and interdisciplinary settings, including the Evergreen State College and UC San Diego, from which I hold an M.F.A. in Writing.