FRANKIE ROLLINS
writer of myths, fairy tales, & other true stories
Love the things you love.
Ask for no permission.
meet frankie.
In 2001, Frankie Rollins advertised her first class with a sandwich board at a farmer's market. Twenty-some years and a couple thousand writers later, she's still doing things her own way.
Maybe it started earlier than the sandwich board. Frankie was a joint custody kid who moved every two weeks for six years. Some mornings she woke up and didn't know what the backyard looked like. She learned early how to read a room fast and find the current in it. Call it survival. Call it training. Either way, it made her an observer, a thinker, a writer, before she ever called herself one.
By the time she left academia in 2023, she'd held 41 jobs across 7 states and lived in 25 different places. For years she thought this made her a mess. It took her a long time to understand what she now teaches other people in a fraction of the time: the chaos was never a liability. It was the material.
From that first sandwich board, she taught in import stores, living rooms, coffeeshops, florists, and K-12 classrooms, eventually landing as honors and creative writing faculty at a college. Then she left, not because the work failed her, but because she'd learned something bigger than any classroom could hold. In 2023, she founded the Fifth Brain Collective and taught people using an emphasis on strengths, experimentation, and joy.
She's the author of Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence (2023), and two works of fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (2013) and The Grief Manuscript (2020). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.
Frankie still believes what she believed that first Saturday at the market. You already have your majesty, your fifth brain. All you have to do is give yourself permission to know it.
Fifth Brain Collective
In 2023, Frankie Rollins built a community. The Fifth Brain Collective was born from a conviction that writers already have what they need to write, but that they need to believe it matters. She created an online space for one-on-one coaching and a community writing experience unlike any other.
In FBC memberships, genre and expertise level are never separated. Beginners sit beside novelists. Poets sit beside memoirists. Frankie has found, over and over, that watching someone else's living experiment, and talking about what works and what doesn't, teaches more than any workshop built around hierarchy ever could.
Frankie is the author of Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence (2023), and two works of fiction: The Sin Eater & Other Stories (2013) and The Grief Manuscript (2020).
She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and what came after was less a career than a study: writers, the strange magic of their brains, and the obstacles that keep getting in the way. Do You Feel Like Writing? came directly out of that work, an attempt to give writers permission to love their own writing in ways that are not only literary, but transformative, spiritual, and communal.
Three years into running FBC, Frankie has learned what actually keeps a creative life alive: permission for experimentation, a regular rhythm of writing, prompts that provoke rather than soothe, and a community that reflects your strengths back to you instead of your flaws. Whether you find your way into your own text and style through private coaching with Frankie, or through the weekly gathering of the collective, you will find something steady here. A place built to hold you while you become the writer you already are.
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
