Patricia Weaver Francisco

Patricia Weaver Francisco is the author of Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery (HarperCollins), which won the Minnesota Book Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction. She is the author of Cold Feet, a novel (Simon & Schuster), Village Without Mirrors, a collection of lyric essays (Milkweed Editions), and the plays Sign of a Child, and Lunacy (The Dramatic Publishing Company).

Francisco says, “Working privately with writers is a joy for me, an outgrowth of my life’s work. I write both fiction and creative nonfiction myself, and I’ve mentored numerous writers through published book-length projects in both genres. My deepest work is that of a “developmental editor,” accompanying you as an attentive and honest reader, noticing what is shining from the page, then “worrying it around” as I would my own work, to find ways you might re-enter the work in revision.

I believe that writing is a transformative process, and a process that can be guided despite its unpredictability. After more than 30 years of teaching—at The Loft and in Hamline University’s MFA program—I can never predict which writers will persist long enough in their work to discover their voice, their most urgent material, and their formal homes. I find this aspect of teaching tremendously exciting and want always to work with anyone who feels drawn to work with me.”