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Author: Rachel Dempsey

Rachel Dempsey has written and directed over a dozen plays for numerous acclaimed theater organizations such as Imagination Stage and ArtStream. Her prose has won contests such as The Colorado Gold Rush Literary Awards, the Denver Women’s Press Club Emerging Writers Contest and the Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition. Her short fiction appears in anthologies from Shacklebound Books, Brigids Gate Press, Timber Ghost Press and Twenty Bellows (Pushcart nominated, 2023). She holds a BFA in Drama and English from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a Master’s degree in Journalism from Georgetown University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis in Denver where she currently lives with her husband and three daughters.

The Olympics, but for Writers

Posted on July 23, 2024July 23, 2024 by Rachel Dempsey

More awards, most of which no one has ever heard of. Training involves writing sprints, editing marathons and lots of literary gymnastics. Potential injuries include carpal tunnel, blurred vision and caffeine overdose. Even when you win, you’re not sure why, but when you lose, it was definitely rigged. Events take place in the corner of…

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How to Use Hybrid Forms to Build Suspense

Posted on June 25, 2024June 24, 2024 by Rachel Dempsey

In my MFA program, I learned about hybrid forms as a common technique in experimental literary fiction and poetry, but lately I’ve noticed it more often in the genre fiction I read. In his most recent novel, Horror Movie, Paul Tremblay interweaves scenes from a fictional screenplay with traditional prose. Brian McAuley uses the same…

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What Readers Say Behind Our Backs (and Sometimes to Our Faces)

Posted on May 28, 2024May 28, 2024 by Rachel Dempsey

I recently had the privilege of moderating a discussion between a local author and an inaugural book club in Silverthorne. After the two hour dialogue, my author friend and I shared our impressions over a glass of wine. Number one take-away: most readers are not writers and therefore say things we would never say to…

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Too Many Eyes?

Posted on April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Rachel Dempsey

With one week left before the deadline to enter the Colorado Gold Literary Awards, we are receiving more entries every day. I’m not here to discuss procrastination (plenty of other posts have already been written about that) but rather what a writer might be doing in those final days before a deadline, be it for…

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A Winning Workshop Proposal

Posted on March 26, 2024March 27, 2024 by Rachel Dempsey

Thank you to all the writers from our community and beyond who submitted proposals for the Colorado Gold Conference. As I finish my third year on the workshop selection committee, I’d like to share some insights on what makes a winning proposal. Best of luck to all this year! It was an honor to review…

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