Paulette Perhach - Hugo House

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“Paulette Perhach is a teacher you can trust. She knows the creative writing process from hard work and constant practice.” — Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning author of The Way of the Writer and Middle Passage

Paulette Perhach $100/hr

Services Offered

One-on-One coaching sessions
Read Complete Book Proposal
Read first 15 pages of manuscript and provide feedback

Available For

Book Proposals
Essay
Guidance in applying for awards/residencies
Guidance in submissions to magazines or publishers
Line-Editing/Copyediting
Literary Journalism
Marketing/Promotion
Memoir
Preparing applications for College/MFA/etc.

Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, ELLE, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Stylist UK, and Salon. She’s worked for Health and Coastal Living magazines, as well as various newspapers.

In 2008 she launched Drift, an arts and culture monthly, which won Best New Magazine from the Florida Magazine Association that year. Hugo House awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013. She was nominated for the 2016 BlogHer Voices of the Year award for her essay, “Fuck Off Fund,” which is included in the anthology Freshman Year of Life from Flatiron Books and forthcoming in The Future Is Feminist: Radical, Funny, and Inspiring Writing by Women from Chronicle Books, out in 2019. In 2018, Perhach won two travel writing awards from the Solas Awards. She is represented by Fletcher & Co.

During her time as a Peace Corps volunteer, Perhach produced an educational podcast that garnered more than 40,000 downloads. In 2015 she created the Writer’s Welcome Kit, an online course for writers that includes a 55,000-word workbook, which nearly 400 students have taken. Hugo House licenses and sells the course, and Sasquatch Books, now an imprint of Penguin Random House, will publish a book inspired by the course, called Welcome to the Writer’s Life.

Perhach worked for three years in the tech industry, selling $10M in technology with 200 proposals, which honed her skills for writing book proposals later.

Perhach holds a magazine journalism degree from the University of Florida, as well as three-fourths of an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University, which got interrupted by the success of the Fuck Off Fund essay when it reached a million readers.

Working Style

I mimic the process of working with an editor to prepare you for that stage in your writing career. I combine line edits with a longer response to the piece, as well as a conversation where you can ask questions about my notes and we can brainstorm ways to move the piece to the next level.

Like an editor, I’m going to have high standards for your work, and I’m not going to let you pretend something is finished when you have more work to do.

I’ll help you examine your writing as well as your life around your writing, your identity as a writer, and the way you design your time and space to suite a creative practice which must include both reading and writing consistently.

I’m happy to meet for a free 15-minute consultation.

I can help writers who speak English or Spanish.

Availability

I am a full-time freelance writer with a packed but flexible schedule. I can meet weekly or monthly, even fortnightly, and prefer to meet in the afternoon at Hugo House, as I reserve the morning for creative work. I’m available after 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Phone, video call, or in-person meetings work well for me.

Interests

I’ll help you find the universal in your memoir and ask the big questions in your personal essays. I’ll push you to take risks and see your life through a more critical lens. I’ll apply my magazine journalism degree and training in feature writing to help you pull a reader through your experiences in a way they feel grateful for once they’ve finished your story.

Let’s talk about travel, technology, the future, money, food, relationships, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and life design. Or teach me something new and I’ll teach you how to talk about it so people want to listen.