LESLIE BLANCO
Leslie is a writer, a writing and creativity coach, a shaman in training, a Cuban-French-American, a Cuban history geek, and a perpetual student of that wild and esoteric ride, the creative process.
WRITER
Leslie's most recent short story, A Ravishing Sun, was selected for Best American Short Stories 2022, and was originally published by New Letters. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review , PANK , Southern Humanities Review, Calyx, and The Coachella Review, among others. Her most recent interviews can be found at Southern Humanities Review, The Kenyon Review and PANK. Her story, I Haven't Forgotten You, won Big Muddy's 2019 Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Prize in 2019. In 2021, My Wish For You in the Land of the Dead: a Cuban Sandwich was the winner of the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize at Hunger Mountain.
Leslie is the grateful recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, a Hedgebrook fellowship, a Rona Jaffe fellowship, and generous writing residencies at Centrum Center for the Arts and Blue Mountain Center. She has an MFA in fiction from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and a novel (okay two) in the closet.
WRITING COACH GONE ROGUE
Leslie used to edit debut novels. She spent months and years reading the slush pile for agents and fancy literary journals. She even helped judge super fancy fellowship applications. Back when, she used to teach such traditional things as structure, dialogue, point of view, narrative stance and screenwriting in the creative writing departments of LeMoyne College, Syracuse University and the Syracuse YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center, as well as in private venues (i.e. her own living room). But then she got semi-accidentally pregnant with triplets and went rogue.
SHAMAN IN TRAINING
For years, Leslie meditated with Yogis, Zen Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Hindus, astrology enthusiasts, agnostics, Catholic monks, shamans of several traditions, and many, many dogs. She completed a five-part series on Contemplative Art at Shambhala Meditation Center. She played silent (and not silent) dance games, learned a little improv, and went down the spectacular rabbit hole of shamanic dreaming. In 2021, after a year-long course in the Andean Medicine Wheel, she was initiated as a shaman.
THE WONDER WORKS
Leslie's workshops incorporate meditation, shamanic practices, Buddhist dharma art, improv, movement and play to invite a state of flow, curiosity and effortless creativity. Her specialty is reigniting a creative project, or a creative life, that has begun to feel leaden.
For those interested in the transformative work of the medicine wheel, Leslie teaches the traditional practices untraditionally. In addition to the traditional soul languages of dream and symbol, she uses creativity, play and loving-kindness meditation to empower her students to divine the secret desires of their souls, and thereby call their souls back into their bodies, their lives and their creative projects.
COACHING
Leslie still teaches and coaches writers, but now she includes visual artists and anyone who needs a little out of the box inspiration. Now the teaching's about delight, play, the non-thinking wisdom of the body, and the primordial, pre-thought space of infinite possibility, which is all any of us are really after anyway.