Nikki Loftin

Let me check… yep, yep. I recognize this feeling. It’s the exact same way I felt when I got asked to go to the prom my sophomore year of high school. Butterflies in the stomach, stupid grin on my face, wondering if I could be dreaming.
But this time it’s not the captain of the gymnastics [...]

Last night, my Grandma fell and broke her ribs. Well, only two of them, but that’s enough when you’re 89. This is the Grandma I keep writing picture books and essays about (that’s her with her stapler in this month’s Skirt! essay). We’re beyond close. She taught me to bake cookies, to hang laundry, to [...]

I am home with a sick kid today, like most of the rest of North America, it seems. If you are home, too, or avoiding your writing, or waiting for a phone call, here’s a beautifully written, evocative essay that I found on the Editorial Ass(istant) website. The essay is by Alexander Chee, about his [...]

Oh, wow. So, last night I attended the monthly Writer’s League of Texas meeting. This one was  a very good panel, with authors Varian Johnson (a good speaker, and not so hard on the eyes), Stephanie Klein (a hoot!), and some other guy who writes terribly serious non-fiction about oil and energy and seemed very, [...]

When I was in graduate school, every semester the writers were required to take a “workshop” class. This was where you went to have your soul sucked out through your nostrils with coffee straws. Or at least that’s what it felt like. One of the Austin SCBWI members (and a phenomenal writer) Margo Rabb, wrote [...]

As Gertrude Stein said, “Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anybody.” So I wanted to take a quick moment to thank all my friends, family, and strangers from the Blogosphere for sending your lovely comments about my essays. THANK YOU!
Here’s a little payback for my writer friends: I discovered a writer blog by an Austin [...]

Okay, let’s just get this out there: Everything I write is autobiographical. I’m not going to tell the lie I learned in my graduate school writing workshops. I don’t make all this stuff up. Not really.
Well, I mean, of course I make it up. But what I’ve been noticing more and more is the things [...]