Welcome to The Museletter with Kate Moses

…about women writing, and women, and writing, and birds, and muses, and sometimes dogs.

I’m Kate Moses, a writer, editor, teacher and student of writing, and literary mentor – a role I absolutely love and the reason, eight years ago, I launched Birds & Muses to help other women writers get their work done.

I’ve spent forty years in the literary field, collaborating with other writers in the process of making art while also making my own. I know first-hand how hard it is to be alone in that endeavor, and the gift of having others who value what you’re doing and help you get it done.

As a feminist, I’m a believer in sharing the wealth, in our collective power to encourage each other, and the mutual benefit that comes from inhabiting a space where making art is understood as an essential function of being human — that art is the pursuit, ultimately, of our deeply human desire to be known, and to know ourselves. And here, in this space, it’s acknowledged that the obstacles for women writers to pursue their literary art-making, to tell their stories, to be known, are as real as they were a century ago, when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own.

That reality is getting more real (surreal?) by the day, and it’s getting harder to hear our own truthful voices under all the noise thrown out by those who seek to disempower and coerce women into silence and complicity. Into believing your voice, your story, doesn’t matter.

The purpose of The Museletter is to create a space for truth-seeking for women writers, for the quiet that allows you to hear your own voice and discover your story, that coaxes artistic inspiration and the self that fuels that inspiration forward, and for me to stand alongside you, listening. Listening, with wonder and curiosity — to help you become your own Muse.

HOW THE MUSELETTER WORKS

Once or twice a month you’ll find me here in this safe nest for women writers, refilling the feeders, making space for you, whether you’re a paid subscriber or not. I feel strongly that art has value, that women’s labor has value, and that women artists deserve to be compensated for their work. I also know that not every woman artist can afford the support they need, and as a woman writer with experience and expertise and the ability to mentor others, I am committed to being accessible to as many writers as I can. That’s the big reason behind The Museletter and The Nest, the new online program I’m launching this month at Birds & Muses.

If you’re a writer who can afford to subscribe to The Museletter, please know that your subscription makes it possible for other women writers to receive support through Birds & Muses’ programs of individual and group mentorship.

Paid subscribers, including members of The Nest, will receive additional posts and guidance through special editions of The Museletter, access to the special-edition archive as it grows, and other useful stuff.

We’ll announce when we open for paid subscriptions to The Museletter, but for now, if you like what you’ve read so far and want to keep reading, please consider pledging a future paid subscription.

ABOUT BIRDS & MUSES

Birds & Muses, founded in 2017 by Kate Moses, offers mentorship, writing education, editorial collaboration, professional guidance, and community to women writers of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid works. We offer mentorship individually and in groups, hands-on developmental editing services, and in-person writing-intensive retreats. Launching in February 2025, our newest program is The Nest, which combines all of Birds & Muses’ online offerings with the addition of experienced emotional support.

To apply for The Nest, one of our 2025 in-person retreats, or to learn more about all we do at Birds & Muses, please visit our website.

ABOUT KATE

Kate Moses is best known for her acclaimed novel Wintering, published in 17 languages, her memoir Cakewalk, and her tenure as a founding editor of Salon’s Mothers Who Think and coeditor of the bestselling anthologies Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. Kate and her books have received numerous international prizes and awards, including an American Book Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, a Prix des Lectrices de Elle, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Poets & Writers Debut Fiction selection, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She’s been awarded residencies at Craigardan, Djerassi, Headlands Center for the Arts, Lighthouse Works, and MacDowell.

Her four decades of experience in book, magazine, and online publishing, nonprofit arts administration, community organizing for women artists, and advanced-level teaching of writing began at the legendary North Point Press, where she was the senior acquiring & developmental editor at age 25. After serving on the editorial staffs of several magazines and tenure as the Literary Director of Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Kate became one of the founding editors and staff writers at Salon. Among the writers Kate has worked with as an editor are Gina Berriault, Evan S. Connell, M. F. K. Fisher, Anne Lamott, Denis Johnson, Carole Maso, Peter Matthiessen, Jayne Anne Phillips, James Salter, and Ayelet Waldman. Works under Kate’s editorship have won the James Beard Award, the Narrative Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Faulkner Award, and the Pushcart Prize, among others.

Kate received her MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University and served on the creative writing faculties at San Francisco State, University of San Francisco, and the State University of New York, as well as Gotham Writers Workshop, Hedgebrook, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and has been a guest instructor or visiting writer at over two dozen universities in the US and England.

In 2017 Kate decided to graduate from academic teaching to leverage three decades in the literary field toward working exclusively with women-identified writers through Birds & Muses.

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