Episode 52: Helen Betya Rubinstein Coaches Historian-Writers

Drafting the Past

Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter welcomes someone a little bit different to the podcast: writer and writing coach Helen Betya Rubinstein.

Helen is neither a historian nor a writer or history herself, but she has been working as a writing coach for the past six years, often with historians and other academics. If you remember my conversation with Anna Zeide in episode 29 last year, Helen was the writing coach that Anna and her co-editors brought in to a workshop to help book contributors work on writing essays aimed at wider audiences. I’m delighted to have the chance to talk more with Helen about what exactly a writing coach does and the kinds of conversations she finds herself having with historians. In addition to her work as a coach and teacher, Helen is a writer with MFA degrees from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa, and her essays and fiction have appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Literary Hub. She is the author of a book of lyric fictions and also has a forthcoming book about writing, teaching, and publishing.