She’s a writer. She’s many other things and always a writer. She’s a reader, too. She cares about books. All the books. All the books that need to get written. She cares about writers. All the writers. She cares about art and music. All the artists and musicians. For over twenty years she has been reaching out to her communities to find creative people and empower them. She knows that creative people must access their personalities, knowledge banks, memories, lostness-and-foundness. They must know the dreads, druthers, and dreams within them to make their art and she has developed ways to help them move authentically, confidently, and joyously into their own work. Frankie speaks about creativity through the vessel of writing, because that is her expertise.

​

Writers seeking guidance often find formulaic how-to lists, but no formula fits every writer, nor does it apply to every stage of a writer’s life. What people have to say will change, how they will write their texts will change, and it is from this loose footing that any person writes. To get the writing done, the method must be flexible and singular to each person. Frankie wrote Do You Feel Like Writing? (forthcoming June 2023) to encourage that flexibility and give writers permission to examine the ingredients of their own experiences.

​

In Do You Feel Like Writing?, Frankie writes, “One of the reasons we don’t inherently know whether to trash or treasure our ideas is because movies and books often portray an artistic person accessing a muse from outside of their body. This implies that the most amazing gifts for a writer come from the outside, rather than the inside. The idea of an outside muse implies that we have no control over our writing, can’t access it when we want to, or that we could even lose it. This isn’t so. Every writer has a part of their brain working for them during conscious and unconscious hours, gathering, sifting, and sorting. I call this meaning-maker the fifth brain. Your fifth brain belongs to you. It translates the juices of your observations, churns the connections, isolates the truth of what you want to say. It’s working inside of you right now. You are the muse you seek.”

​

After working with over a thousand writers in informal and formal classes from 4th grade to octogenarians, Frankie is still nourished by helping other writers. She’s thought deeply about the psychology of people who write, and she’s found ways to guide them into their own processes. Her writing community is the culmination of this work, a burgeoning movement based on the Fifth Brain concepts that will teach creative people how to understand and value their own imaginations and harness the wonders particular to each thinker. 

​