FRANKIE ROLLINS
writer of myths, fairy tales, & other true stories
Love the things you love.
Ask for no permission.
meet frankie.
Originally advertising her classes with a sandwich board at a farmer’s market in 2001, Frankie Rollins has taught creative writing in import stores, living rooms, coffeeshops, florists, K-12 classrooms, and as full-time honors and creative writing faculty. In 2023, Frankie left academia to found the Fifth Brain Collective, an online space of radiant warmth for the cultivation of artistic confidence in writers at all levels of experience. Frankie Rollins published Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence (FBC 2023), and two works of fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queens Ferry Press 2013), and The Grief Manuscript (Finishing Line Press 2020).
After earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, Frankie embarked on a study of writers, the magic of their brains and the obstacles getting in their way. After working with thousands of writers, Frankie wrote Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence, to give writers permission to love their own writing in ways that are not just literary; but also transformative, spiritual, and communal.
During the first three years of the Fifth Brain Collective, Frankie has learned that what people need to maintain a creative life: permission for experimentation, regular sessions of writing, evocative prompts, and the comfort of a community reflecting your strengths in conversation.
Fifth Brain Collective
As a working writer, Frankie knows the difficulties and joys of writing and the writing life intimately, but she never forgets that each writer’s path is singular. Frankie converses with writers with an unflagging radiant warmth. She knows that writers must access their personalities, knowledge banks, memories, lostness-and-foundness. She’s the kind of mentor who turns overwhelm into momentum and shows you the path to sustainability for your own particular writing life.
Do You Feel Like Writing?
Frankie has written a book to help you get writing.
Amy Argetsinger, author of the Miss America history There She Was and an editor and writer at The Washington Post writes:
“Other writing gurus want to school you in the strategies to get you through the chore of writing. Frankie Rollins is alert to these tricks and generous with them; her wisdom on the eternal question of how to find time to write is essential. But her true gift is to EXCITE you about writing, by centering you in your body’s very urge to do it. More than a manual for how to write, it’s a manifesto for how to live. How I wish someone had written this passionate, open-hearted, one-of-a-kind book for me years ago.”
PUBLICATIONS
THE GRIEF MANUSCRIPT
Finishing Line Press, 2020
Here are remnants carried over from the surreal specificity of living in the threshold of loss. Rollins’ power lies not in getting over but in her attention while being in the midst. In fact, this is her invitation, her demand, and her gift. Open this book knowing you’ll be greeted by pain so pure as to border on the ecstatic. Expect, too, to be seared by immaculate images, ransacked by dexterous tonal range, and shorn to the bone by the wry sweep of grief written into, which is not to say explained. Each time I read The Grief Manuscript, I am wildly undone, genuinely grateful, and profoundly impressed.
–TC Tolbert
THE SIN EATER AND OTHER STORIES
Queen's Ferry Press, 2013
Damage suffuses The Sin Eater and Other Stories. From within Elizabeth Frankie Rollins’ construct of the blighted home an adulterous husband calls on the services of a stranger to expunge his guilt, a young couple is diagnosed with the bubonic plague, and a bored woman finds herself growing a tail. Yet these others don’t dwell; instead, they frame themselves in a way that is sound in structure and sentiment and plunges them from metaphor into modern-day marvel. In the evocative stories of this debut collection, even the tightest crevices dazzle with restorative possibility.
DOCTOR PORCHIAT'S DREAM
Running Wild Press, 2019
“Then, readers take a sharp turn into the fantastical with an eerie fairy tale called Doctor Porchiat’s Dream by Frankie Rollins that follows the adventures of a quirky physician in a superstitious town as he chases scientific proof of the soul… [and makes] full use of the novella form by deftly exploring the perspectives of various characters.”
other publications
