I work one-on-one with literary writers at all stages of their development, and with scholarly writers looking to reach a wider audience or develop a more harmonious relationship to their work. I’ve also coached and led workshops for a number of groups, including the authors of Acquired Tastes (MIT Press 2021); National Humanities Center Fellows; cross-disciplinary and discipline-specific groups at Yale University, the University of Rochester, and elsewhere; and the New-York Historical Society Center for Women’s History Early-Career Workshop. You can hear me speak about my work on Episode 52 of Drafting the Past, or read about how I coached the authors of Acquired Tastes in an article I wrote with Anna Zeide for The Chronicle. I bring over fifteen years of teaching experience, five years of editorial experience, and a lifelong interest in alternative pedagogies to my coaching practice. Reach me via email or the form here, and read testimonials here.


What’s the difference between a coach and an editor?

Our conversations will take shape around your values, your questions, your process, your history as a writer, and your goals. I’ll read your work and ask questions in return, and together we’ll come up with concrete next steps that move you where you’d like to go. Whether our work together is short-term or long-term, project-focused or not, you can expect to come away with tools and practices to carry into the future.

This approach is process-oriented, big-picture, and generative, even in the final stages of revision. I facilitate, rather than direct. Where “editing” tends to suggest taking away—cutting words or smoothing over bumps and peculiarities that “stand out”—I encourage you to magnify, not muffle, the singularity of your sensibility as a writer. Where editing suggests a power imbalance (a writer is being edited by an editor), your ambitions, not my reading experience, will occupy the center of our conversations. I refuse a scarcity mindset where acceptable outcomes are limited, and take perfectionism to be a tool of white supremacy. No “darlings” will be killed in our work together—instead, we’ll turn toward what energizes and moves you, wherever that heat may lie.

I see coaching as a means of supporting literary and scholarly production outside the demands and entanglements of the publishing and academic industries. This doesn’t mean I won’t help you enter traditional literary or scholarly publishing if that’s your goal, but that I will never take the norms of those industries as a given, and I commit to your vision and your values above all. For those (many) of us coming from harmful, abusive, or otherwise traumatizing graduate school or publication experiences, coaching can be especially supportive as a reparative, healing process.

Each coaching relationship is different. You can read testimonials from some of my former clients here, and schedule a free consultation to talk more about what this might look like for you. You can also write to me.

Testimonials

“My writing sessions with Helen Rubinstein have been the most intellectually rewarding and inspiring experiences of my professional writing career.
The most productive parts of our sessions have been Helen’s clarifying questions. In our back and forth, Helen pushes me to think out loud on the page and to explore alternative interpretations and possibilities. Through this process, I have gained a more precise language for the historical relationships and changes that I struggled to describe on my own. More importantly, I have grown as a writer and have learned to consider readers’ experiences more in my writing. The revised chapters are more honest and more persuasive.
I am grateful for her generosity as a reader, her incredible ability to ask the critical questions of my work, and her range of ideas for moving forward in the writing process. While my work with Helen will end, her lessons will serve me well beyond.” —Heather Ruth Lee, Assistant Professor of History, NYU Shanghai

“I would recommend Helen’s coaching to anyone looking for a guiding writing light, trusted voice, and general doula-type for any creative (or non-creative) project. I would also and especially recommend Helen’s coaching to anyone skeptical of expertise, disdainful of writing advice, burned out on feedback, or who might be reluctant to share their work in its early stages. In more than a decade of various approaches to writing—on my own, informally with others, and through an MFA—my sessions with Helen are the first time I’ve left conversations about my writing feeling consistently and significantly rejuvenated (even inspired), with a clear sense of direction while also newly open to and aware of the possibilities of my writing. If I had known of Helen’s services earlier, I would have skipped all the other stuff.” —L. Morris, fiction & nonfiction writer

“I started working with Helen almost four years ago, and have been amazed by the deep insight, imagination, and humanity she brings to her work. She has transformed the relationship I have to my current project and to my writing in general, helping me find excitement in my ideas and develop a better process for getting them out of my head and onto the page. She’s equally insightful about the writing process and about the writing itself.” —Tasha Eccles, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

“Working regularly with Helen completely transformed my relationship to my writing. I gained confidence in my voice as an author and learned to trust my instincts as a writer—no small feat!” —Assistant Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences, Columbia University

“One of the qualities I most appreciated about Helen was her singular listening skill both with written material and the conversations we had during our coaching sessions. Helen is amazing in her ability to synthesize all of this and reflect back your true intentions and understanding of your project better than you could have ever hoped to articulate yourself, both on the page and as you conceive of it on an internal level.
As this project had been through an intense developmental edit before our sessions, Helen’s approach completely revitalized the material in a fun and exciting way that I was then able to translate to the page. I found Helen’s coaching sessions to be incredibly motivating and educational; since our sessions ended, my writing is immeasurably better with regard to technique and allowing the absolute truth and intentions of my project to come to the fore of every sentence I write.” —Michael L.

“My discussions with Helen helped me focus on the important things in my book. I left every meeting with a new sense of direction and with renewed enthusiasm, which kept me going even during the most challenging parts of the writing process.” —Patrick Greaney, Professor of German and Humanities, University of Colorado Boulder

Helen’s guidance, coaching, and teaching have benefitted me as a writer, an editor, and a thinker. She sees the big picture; she brings a generous spirit to the work; she connects the specifics of the writing grind to the larger world of reader expectations. It’s been so professionally rewarding to work with Helen.” —Benjamin Cohen, Professor, Lafayette College

Read more testimonials, including from my work with the authors of Acquired Tastes.

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I work with writers on…

  • Process. How can the act of writing become more pleasurable, exciting, dynamic, or fulfilling? What routines, practices, or rituals might support your goals?

  • Craft. Let’s talk about structure at the level of the book, the chapter, the sentence, and the phrase. Let’s talk about finding the details that bring your text to life. Let’s talk about how to shape your argument so that your reader changes their mind, and how to tell your story so that your reader never stops reading. Let’s talk style: how can your sentences move and feel the way you hope they will?

  • Clarifying & Generating Ideas. I support scholarly writers as they sharpen arguments, refine argumentation, and clarify meaning, and I work with literary writers to brainstorm plot points, scenes, details, form, and concept.

My trainings & orientations include…

  • Graduate coursework in composition theory, plus training at the Bard Institute for Writing & Thinking. 

  • Ongoing training in and development of anti-oppressive pedagogies, including with the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond and at The New School, where I have taught courses in race, representation, and writing against inequity. You can read more about my approaches to teaching here.

  • Experience as an editor in acquisition and production roles. Please note, however, that I don’t edit others’ work until I have a deep understanding of their ethos as developed over the course of many conversations. If you are looking for someone to whom you can hand over your manuscript and walk away with a marked-up document, I encourage you to seek an editor rather than a coach. 

I have worked with writers from history, sociology, anthropology, literature, data science, biology, linguistics, philosophy, theatre studies, queer studies, climate science, architecture, theology, and more; and those I work with have landed contracts at Chicago, Duke, Princeton, Minnesota, Michigan, and other presses. I am especially excited to work with those challenging dominant social and intellectual narratives through their work. This includes political and cultural historians; narrative and literary theorists; scholars of race, ethnicity, and migration; and everyone writing personal, critical, and imaginative narratives that resist the mythologies of power.

Most people find my rates affordable, and many faculty find they can use research funding for our work together. (I can provide a template for your funding request, if you need.) To the extent that it’s sustainable, I’m committed to meeting writers where they are in terms of resources, investment, and exchange.