Poet and writer for children and adults

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Services

  • Presenter (for Writers): “Your Picture Book as a Mentor Text in the Schools”
  • Presenter (for Parent Groups or Teacher In-service Training): Modeling Comprehension Strategies Through Read-alouds
  • One-to-One Writing Consultant: Poetry, essay, children’s literature. Adults only.

As a developing poet, I’ve immensely enjoyed working with Beth in a one-on-one relationship that includes back and forth online communication and phone conversations. It’s been a truly revelatory experience! Beth’s knowledge of poetic tradition and craft has helped me become aware of both outside resources and the internal processes involved in writing.

Hers is not a how-to approach, but one grounded in critical inquiry, leading me to discover my own voice, my own strengths as a poet. With Beth’s guidance I better understand how to read (and write) for meaning. I’ve learned to ask of my writing: What is its significance?”

I had written page upon page of poems, but now with Beth’s guidance I’m learning much about the revision process. In the words of Ted Kooser, I will: “Keep pitching them horseshoes.”

– Poet and Writer, Isabel O’Hagin

  • Developmental or Line Editing: Essay, short stories, children’s literature. Adults only.
  • Writing Group Facilitator: Are you interested in becoming a part of a Writer’s Group? Elizabeth McBride uses Amherst Writers and Artists techniques that strive to support and develop each writer’s own voice and writing style. Adults only.

Hire Elizabeth

  • "...the writer's ending is, for the reader, always a beginning."
    — Krista Tippett
  • "I have come to love questions more than answers, for it is in our seeking that we are most alive, most open, most willing to come to new understanding."
    — Elizabeth S.E. McBride
  • "The expansiveness that comes from thinking someone else's thoughts and seeing through someone else's eyes is the chief gift bestowed by the written word."
    — Baba Brinkman
  • "...if you listen carefully, as you read, you'll hear a voice whispering to you gently: "you are not alone."
    — Samantha Cristoforetti
  • “What you read becomes part of your human adventure, the world you will make with your words and your life.”
    — Krista Tippett
  • “There is a sweetness in being blindsided by life, by truth, by a dark corner suddenly illumined. There is sheer joy in epiphany.”
    — James Calvin Schaap
  • “…we seek an enlargement of being…We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.”
    — C. S. Lewis
  • “To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, creative writing requires a real act of trust.”
    — Henri Nouwen
  • “Editing is when you get to play with someone in the sandbox of language.”
    — Joe Morgenstern
  • “We take great care with our words, for they are meant to get into our bloodstream.”
    — Richard Foster
  • “Cherish your curiosity. It is your questions that will shape you.”
    — David Delgado
  • “Every day I walk out into the world to be dazzled, then to be reflective.”
    — Mary Oliver
  • “Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us”
    — Henri Nouwen
  • “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
    — Virginia Woolf