Welcome to Heidi Croot

Dinty W. Moore

Sep 1

The Brevity Blog keeps expanding, growing in readership and fielding an increasing number of quality submission, so we're expanding our team. A hearty welcome to Andrea Firth and Heidi Croot who join us as Blog Editors, alongside Allison and Dinty who are still on the job, looking for fresh voices and fresh perspectives. Andrea introduced herself yesterday, and Heidi does so today. We are thrilled to have them on the team.

Heidi Croot

Brevity Blog is that place writers dream of.

The writers' café.

Worn pine floors, rickety round tables crowded together, fragrance of coffee and cinnamon—the place where writers meet for fellowship and deep dives into the kind of craft talk many of us can't access at home. The place where we get to share our despair with protagonists who refuse to "arc" and rejection letters that missed the point. The place where we exult in our successes knowing others understand what it took.

I love it here as a reader and a writer, and I'm going to love it even more as an editor. Words have been my solace and surprise since I wrote my first (okay, only) novel at 10 and, later, turned in weekly columns about secondary school life to the village newspaper, edited by my mother.

From there it was on to an Honours BA in English at London Ontario's Western University with no thought to the future other than I wanted to read books and write essays. Happily, I landed a decades-long career in corporate communication that involved writing strategic plans, speeches, trade press articles, and annual reports for both the private and public sectors. Being edited and editing others was just part of the job.

In 2006, I went freelance, and a few years later, feeling edgy and unfulfilled, eased out the screen door and into the garden. I wanted to be a creative writer.

Writers' groups were my way in—three at last count—resulting in several shelves of "how-to-edit" books. I was terrified. I knew how to edit for business, but poetry? YA science fiction? Speculative fiction?

What powered me through was the joy in learning that comes with editing and applying those new skills to my own writing, including my memoir, now in its final edit (excerpt here). More joy from admiring what sparkles, noticing where a bridge needs repair, and helping writers add their voice to the buzz in the writers' café and beyond.

Thank you, Dinty and Allison, editors extraordinaire, for the opportunity to join the Brevity Blog team.

And to the 87,000 Brevity Blog subscribers, those burning with ideas and those rocking the fence: Read the guidelines and submit. This is your time. We are eager to embrace your words.

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