FRANKIE ROLLINS
writer of myths, fairy tales, & other true stories
Love the things you love.
Ask for no permission.
Do You Feel Like Writing?
Frankie has written a book to help you get writing.
"In a sea of how-to creative writing books, Do You Feel Like Writing? stands out due to how Rollins values the magic of each reader's individual imagination while also offering practical ideas and prompts useful for anyone who longs to express themselves, but feels like they don't have the time or confidence. The book embodies the perfect marriage between honoring the mystical creative spark within all of us (what Rollins calls the Fifth Brain) and sharing the tools and motivation we need to materialize that spark." -Andrea F
meet frankie.
As a kid, Frankie was a voracious reader. She read books late into the night, hanging off her bed to catch a triangle of light from the hall. Sometimes, she pretended to be sick so she could lie on the bathroom floor and read in full light. Reading was her first inspiration. Frankie could feel the stories expand inside of her, become real, take up tangible space in her imagination and offer information about how to live or not live her life. This gave her permission for her own writing to start spilling out and it has never stopped. Her stout devotion to reading and writing has marked her entire life.
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).
About artistic confidence, Frankie says, I don’t operate in fear of being accepted or rejected anymore. I write for myself first. I write to save myself in the complications of a human life. Other people sometimes like to read what I write and that is always a bonus. I shook myself free of the feeling in writing, like my academic job, that there is “someone” watching and they are looking for you to fail. I stopped worrying about what the someone would think, all the someones, and turned to my own deep instincts for guidance. Radical artistic freedom awaited me. I’m a deeply happy writer.
Fifth Brain Collective
You have written it. Some pages, maybe. Some chapter titles. Some lines of poetry. A snippet of memoir. You know you have permission to write. You know your voice will have resonance for a reader, somewhere. You are curious and empowered and you write.
This is what the Fifth Brain Collective offers you.
Join a weekly creativity/writing call on Zoom with other writers.
Work with Frankie one-on-one on your project.
Take a class, online or on a live Zoom.
Join the free weekly writing Sprint, called Fruit Cup because it's refreshing and fun.
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
manuscripts in the works
THE EMPTY HOUSE:
FAIRYTALES FOR DISAPPOINTED WOMEN
In “700-Year-Old Witch Goes on a Date,” a witch tries a medieval dating app (for a fee, monks illustrate your portrait to put in a book), and the witch dates mythical creatures, animals, and people and while facing the truths of solitude and the deep development of self. In “Falling Apart,” an isolated divorced woman, unable to deal with her anger, steps into her office and blasts apart from the inside, scattering limbs all over the office, dependent on her community for reconstruction. In “Traps,” the delay of a honeymoon allows a bride to foresee the ordinariness of her marriage, driving her to become feral and attempt escape. In “My Affair with the Miser of Time,” an untamable woman falls in love with a minute-counter, thinking her lover has changed until it’s clear that he seeks to corral her massive energies into his stingy minutes. In other stories there are ghosts, monsters, and a seamstress of meaning. These female-identified narrators become othered in their search for a life worth their trouble.
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