Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life

by Alexis Paige

At the ripe age of forty, when Alexis Paige was finally diagnosed with ADHD—Inattentive Type, she rolled her eyes even before the doctor could finish spelling out her new marching orders: “The goal now,” he said, “is to learn how to work smart, not hard.”

“But that doesn’t sound like any fun,” she said. She was going to have to do this, too—ironically, inexplicably, comically—as she did everything else, the hard way.

Part memoir, part craft guide, Work Hard, Not Smart, shows how Alexis lives her messy literary life. She invites you to step into her mismatched shoes. And if you do, you’ll find the writing companion you’ve been looking for.

Genres: Writing, Memoir, Nonfiction

230 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2022

About the author

This author is also published under Alexis Fox Paige.

Alexis Paige is the author of two books: WORK HARD, NOT SMART: HOW TO MAKE A MESSY LITERARY LIFE, a craft memoir and ode to Adult ADHD; and NOT A PLACE ON ANY MAP, a memoir in vignettes about the geography of trauma and addiction—both published by Vine Leaves Press. Her essays “Common Purple Lilac” and “The Right to Remain” appeared as Notables in The Best American Essays series. Paige’s work also appears in many journals and anthologies, including Longform, Hippocampus, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, and on Brevity, where she was an Assistant Editor from 2013-2019. Winner of the New Millennium Nonfiction Prize, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and twice a top-ten finalist in Glamour Magazine’s essay contest, she holds an MA in Poetry from San Francisco State University and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine. Paige is a development editor (aka, book whisperer), and she lectures and teaches widely on writing, writing craft, and social justice issues. Assistant Professor of English at Vermont Technical College, Paige has also served as guest faculty at the Stonecoast MFA program, as writer-in-residence at Bay Path University, and as visiting artist at Saint Lawrence University. She writes and edits from a converted farmhouse pantry in Vermont, where she lives with her husband and a rotating cast of rescue animals.

Reviews

[Ian Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grab bag of essays on writing, trauma, race, and finding one's path, this collection is at all times incredibly smart and perceptive. Paige writes with a sharp wit and down-to-earth style that makes even the most high-minded of topics approachable, and I enjoyed seeing what each new section of the book would bring.

It's hard to say which part of the book I enjoyed most: Act One chronicles Paige's journey as a writer with ADHD finding her voice, with plenty of insights on teaching, reading, and MFA programs. Act Two focuses on the acknowledgement of America's complex racial issues, which Paige comes to terms with after a stretch in jail after a drunk driving accident. Finally, Act Three moves forward, with some beautifully written memoirs and innovative creative nonfiction that takes the form of a pre-flight announcement and a survival guide to the AWP conference. In a clever send-up of networking for writers, one of my favorite jokes involved her meeting an elderly poet who informs her multiple times about his "new and selected." Together these essays show the breadth of a talented writer, and aren't to be missed!

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Tina Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very well written, although I have to admit it was not my cup of tea. I found it hard to start out but it improved as time went on. A good book for those just starting out in their writing career as many tips.

[Laura Jevtich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review By Laura Jevtich @LauraNSasha everywhere

Work Hard, Not Smart byAlexis Paige

How to make a messy literary Life, a memoir.

First off, I wanted to thank Amazon for the amazing way you can read a book on your iPhone, using the Kindle application. This application has a notebook within it, so that you can highlight and write notes of the book. Then you can send those notes to your computer so that you can read and write a review.

From her Blurb: “Part memoir, part craft guide, Work Hard, Not Smart, shows how Alexis lives her messy literary life.”

I am reading memoirs to help me write my own. Most of the time, I am reading what I am NOT going to do.

I suppose I should not have read this book, as I am a linear person who does not have ADHD. I saw the word memoir and thought that this would be an interesting read from a writer. What I found was a dissertation, maybe for one of those acronyms from a college teacher’s life. The number of times I had to check the dictionary (again, thank you, Amazon for setting up not only a dictionary but also Wikipedia and Translate) was at least a quarter of the time, and I am supposedly well read!

I used the Kindle app to its fullest level, using the highlighter colors for specific parts.

•Pink for useful tidbits of information
•Blue for serious notes about her style of writing as I try to relate to the author
•Yellow for grammar or spelling errors, or words that are jargon or foreign words
•Orange for profanity. This made her unrelatable to me. I can not understand how a literary person needs to use a profanity.

Whenever there is a pink highlight, I created a hard return so that I could find it later.

I guess I did not read the “part craft guide” to actually mean she was going to guide us into what to do as a writer. I still do not know much about her or her life. Typically, a memoir talks about a specific time in a person’s life, but because of her “messy life” I did not get a real sense of her or what period she wrote about. What I read was all over the map.

There are no spoilers, but there are locations within the book where I highlighted the words.

Highlight(pink) - Location 130 Creative Nonfiction, my genre of choice. Creative Nonfiction, or CNF, includes many more forms than appear here, such as the flash essay (short-form nonfiction);

Highlight(pink) - Location 131 the personal essay (longer than flash, shorter than memoir); memoir (a book-length Highlight(pink) - Location 132 personal narrative from a life, not of a life);

Highlight(blue) - Location 282 I, of the mostly-now-forgotten Generation-X, aka the latchkey kid generation, Note - She is in the same generation as me. Is that why I like her writing?
Highlight(blue) - Location 295 college in 1997. Note - Ok, she is 7 years younger than me.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 371 peripatetic Note - Why the use of these words? Does she really think it would make us look at the dictionary?
Highlight(orange) - Location 374 fuck Note - Ok. She and I are nothing alike. There is no way I would use that word in a book, no matter how much I might think it.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 376 dysmorphic Note - Another dictionary word
Highlight(yellow) - Location 420 meta-consciousness Note - What is this supposed to mean? I cannot find it in the Dictionary or Wikipedia, do I have to go to the Urban Dictionary?
Highlight(yellow) - Location 429 chrononauts. Note - Again, dictionary word that is not found in the Dictionary! Did not find it in Wikipedia too!

Highlight(pink) - Location 444 survivor of depression and panic, a survivor of two months in jail, Note - See, will she talk about this? Her jumbled essays make my linear brain hurt.

Highlight(yellow) - Location 462 portraiture Note - Again Dictionary time
Highlight(blue) - Location 522 “Everything worthwhile is a discipline, a craft—life and love most of all.” Note - She uses a bunch of quotes from other books. Is it just to fill up the page or does it really help to make her point?
Highlight(yellow) - Location 527 autodidact, Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(yellow) - Location 534 gimpy Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(yellow) - Location 572 occlusion Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(yellow) - Location 605 duffers Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(blue) - Location 613 “I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” Note - There is a quote but who said it?
Highlight(orange) - Location 623 “fucked-up Note - Nope, not going to use that word in my writing.
Highlight(orange) - Location 625 fucked up Note - One with a dash and one without.
Highlight(blue) - Location 630 to-MFA or to-not-MFA debate, Note - Probably should have told us what is a MFA? Some of us don’t know. Explain it first here rather than down the middle of the paragraph.
Highlight(blue) - Location 632 MFA, or a Master of Fine Arts (usually in or of a genre like fiction, poetry, or nonfiction) Note - Here it is but again, two flips afterwards!
Highlight(blue) - Location 635 two/two Note - What?
Note - Location 637 Again what? For us not in academia or college teaching, we have no idea what you are talking about. It is useless jargon.
Highlight(blue) - Location 650 (which was connected to scene-making, which I will discuss later), Note - The use of parenthesis is wrong and there should be a comma beforehand.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 654 seminal Note - Again Dictionary

Highlight(blue) - Location 654 Vivian Gornick writes, “The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, and experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts” (14). To “remember what it was to be me,” Didion says, is the point of keeping a notebook (para. 9). Note - This is the first footnote I’ve seen yet we are already on #14?
Highlight(blue) - Location 666 In the beginning of her book, Gornick takes the reader to a funeral, Note - This entire chapter has her discussing a book that I haven’t read. If I wanted to read that book, I guess I would have. And this chapter is definitely way longer that her other chapters, with serious tangents going in multiple directions.
Highlight(blue) - Location 669 “had been composed” Note - Why is this footnote 4 when the last one was 14?
Highlight(blue) - Location 675 First, the narrator must be reliable. Note - Is this her writing or Vivian’s?
Highlight(yellow) - Location 680 Gornick writes, “The man who speaks those sentences is the story being told: a civilized man-made…” Note – Again, no footnote after having footnotes above!
Highlight(yellow) - Location 690 writer’s purpose” (17). Note - Again, the footnote is out of order.

Highlight(pink) - Location 695 Good readers make good writers, Note - Finally, a quote that may be her own.

Highlight(yellow) - Location 698 dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of ‘becoming’: Note - Looks like I’ll have to find this book.
Highlight(blue) - Location 703 Marquart observed, “taking all of the story out of the story.” Note - Who is this and why is there no footnote to the quote?
Highlight(blue) - Location 710 In her book about memoir, Judith Barrington talks about the principle of balancing scene, summary, and musing, or what some call reflection. Note - Again, no footnote.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 714 Important in and of themselves, these big conversations signal that a necessary codification of the genre has emerged and continues to grow. But the meta conversations Note - Dissertation? And a change in spelling, with or without the dash of meta whatever.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 717 CNF Note - Spell it out!
Highlight(blue) - Location 723 One of Mura’s first tasks for me was to read Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey. This book and others on storytelling gave me a fundamental understanding of narrative structure, including understanding Joseph Campbell’s mythic Hero’s Journey, understanding narrative arc, three-act structures, and the role of conflict and characters’ goals and obstacles in creating narrative drive and tension. Note - Great, now another book she is suggesting for us to read.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 728 catharsis Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(blue) - Location 729 “Whatever it meant to Aristotle, the word [catharsis] has come to mean something to us: a sudden release of emotions that can be brought about by good entertainment, great art, or probing for psychological insight … catharsis has always been a desired effect and in fact is the mainspring of the dramatic experience” (341). Note - What is going on? You were in the teens with footnotes and now hundreds? And not only that, I went to the back of the book, AND YOU HAVE NO FOOTNOTES! I am not going to note anything else. This book, as far as I can tell, is not her memoir, but is a thesis. Her need for dictionary words and Wikipedia makes this no story, even though she writes her dissertation on story.

At This Point
I was ready to give up. It was just a discussion of different books she had read and her take on them. Since I was not going to read other books while reading hers, I decided to skip ahead (quickly read without commenting or caring what I read) and go to Bookmark - Location 1242

Note - Location 1248 Is this the beginning of the memoir?
Highlight(blue) - Location 1259 schadenfreude Note: Again, Dictionary and Translate
Note - Location 1408 Really! The dash is different so I cannot look up the word.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1479 monere, Note - Again Dictionary.

Highlight(blue) - Location 1494 “I’m trying to see what it’s like, in other words, not just to practice, but to have a practice. I’d like to reach a point where the choice to sit at the piano or go for a walk is less and less a choice and more and more simply what I do. Progress is gratifying, of course: a permanent ban on drilling matters, and a decent piano performance might be fun. But until then spending a little time every day with music and wandering the watershed with an ear to the river might eventually become a habit, like something one wears, not so much a garment, but skin, part of the body. Habit then might deepen to inhabit, to dwell in a place, maybe even a life. I’d like that.”
Note - Habits can become goals. Spending time at the craft is worthwhile.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1511 epistemology, Note - Again Dictionary
Highlight(blue) - Location 1541 First, I was pretending. Note - So all the other stuff was word stuffing?
Highlight(orange) - Location 1566 motherfucker. Note - Yikes, nope no way.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1581 Fernet Branca Note - Again Dictionary

Note - Location 1612 This jumping around is maddening.

Highlight(blue) - Location 1630 euphemism. Note - Again Dictionary
Note - Location 1722 No footnote

Highlight(pink) - Location 1815 Writing is a lifelong pursuit, not a month-long sprint, not a New Year’s resolution, and not a zero-sum game. Note - Finally, a quote that I can understand.

Highlight(yellow) - Location 1819 formula, that Note - Grammatical errors
Highlight(orange) - Location 1858 fuck Note - Nope
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1871 Amygdala Note - Really?
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1881 aerophobe Note - No definition for this word on Wikipedia, Dictionary, or Translate.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1881 aerophile, Note - Again and this time, spelled different!
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1899 apocryphal Note - Really? Wouldn’t fictitious worked just as easily?
Highlight(blue) - Location 1906 “Two on Two,” from Creative Nonfiction shows, what works, well, works. And this opening works: Once upon a time, a long time ago, I rambled through thickets of brawny power forwards and quicksilver cocksure guards and rooted ancient… Note - More adding of words. And maybe this is from that jargon above that I had no clue what it meant?
Highlight(blue) - Location 1909 “centers, trying to slide smoothly to the hoop, trying to find space in the crowd to get off my shot, trying to maneuver at high speed with the ball around corners and hips and sudden angry elbows, … I was hammered by in playgrounds, men as fierce as the fellow who once took off his sweats and laid his shot-gun down” Note - Word stuffing and without footnotes!
Highlight(blue) - Location 1920 “Daisy Hernandez’s 2017 essay, “Wings,” from Brevity, takes another approach syntactically, but as with “Two on Two,” the opening lines launch the piece with…” Note - Word stuffing and without footnotes!

Highlight(blue) - Location 1925 It is the early eighties, the start of the civil war in El Salvador, and Maira is a child of the raindrops that come early in the summer. Thousands of raindrops. Maybe millions. Las lluvias. Desperate raindrops that smash into the mountains and the treetops, prod the soil and also the pebbles and flores, the earth forced into a river moving downward.
Note - Again Word stuffing and without footnotes and this time, words that need to be translated and ugh.
Highlight(blue) - Location 1971 She lands it like this: The drapes, now hung high and wide, shield against the cold. In the same way, perhaps that dorm room back in Colorado still shelters stillness … and let the light back in. Note - Again extra words without footnotes.
Highlight(blue) - Location 1986
She writes: “From where she and her sister buried themselves for hours, she heard the screams of women and children … selling the children to childless couples, making infants and toddlers and older Note - Location 1990 (four pages of words) Hernandez not the writer. Again, more words that could just be summed up, or is it just adding words to a memoir that isn’t a memoir but a dissertation on several people’s essays and books?
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1997 ligature Note - Again. Use normal words.
Highlight(blue) - Location 2054 AWP, Note - We don’t all know what you are talking about here!
Highlight(orange) - Location 2080 fucking Note - Nope
Highlight(blue) - Location 2089 AWP, Note - So now you describe what it is, in a future chapter?
Highlight(blue) - Location 2090 AWP stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Note - Again, it takes 38 page flips to find the definition of the acronym!

Highlight(pink) - Location 2105 book, The Art of Time in Memoir, was “cool”;
Note - Might actually find this one to read it.

Highlight(orange) - Location 2108 “motherfucker” Note - Nope
Highlight(orange) - Location 2114 “Write Like a Motherfucker” Note - I don’t care if this is a thing.
Highlight(orange) - Location 2119 fucked up. Even the famous ones and the almost-famous ones who are fucking themselves and each other or else they are writing about fucking themselves and each other. Note - Why do writers use profanity?
Highlight(orange) - Location 2123 shitty Note – Again, why?

Highlight(pink) - Location 2130 I grab my planner and Handy Guide to Nonfiction Panels (RIP, Ned), the giant conference schedule booklet, and I highlight. Note - Finally, something I can connect myself to the author.

Highlight(orange) - Location 2132 motherfucker. Note - Nope. Just connected and then stepped away from her vileness.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 2137 “Combat Medic Kit. If, like me, you suffer from both actual and imagined illnesses, you will want to be prepared in case of a blowout at the book fair, a paroxysm in panel, or (god forbid, crossing myself just in case) an embolism in flight. Make sure you pack the essentials: Vitamin C, pain reliever, prescriptions, antacids, calamine lotion, antiseptic, anti-diarrheals, anti-anxieties, anti-inflammatories, anti-psychotics, tourniquet, EpiPen, staple gun, and emergency flares (better safe than sorry). In case of emergency, you can find me, my kit, and my hypochondriac’s diagnostic wheel at the Brevity table in the book fair. I’ll be the one trying to fly a pinball machine” Note - Location 2143 Added words and spelling error.

Highlight(pink) - Location 2145 “Snacks. Leftover jellybeans and Peeps (which double as action figures for book fair dioramas), cigarettes (or nicotine gum), gum (nicotine gum), energy drinks, coffee (instant single-serve pouches are a lifesaver!), Emergen-C, Ziploc bags—for book fair loot and snacks you can pilfer from various hotel lobbies. Note - Location 2147 True for any in person conference. But I do like how she used the Peeps.

Highlight(yellow) - Location 2155 Not long before the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded at 48,000 feet over Florida and on the television screen squatted atop the A/V cart rolled into my fifth-grade classroom, my elementary school held a balloon launch: Note - Location 2158 What is going on with the formatting? There are extra spaces and returns within the paragraph. And at least one or two commas missing.

Highlight(blue) - Location 2175 I hope mainly that I’ve said something important, something worthy of the miles they travel to reach you.

Note - So happy to be at the end of this book, at 2100 flips or whatever. There may still be 21 minutes left to the book, but those are just appendix and about the author. I will of course look at them but not read unless it makes sense to do so.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Joanne Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Alexis Paige’s new book, Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life, we are treated to a deep reflection (and quite a few good laughs) on what it is to be an educator, memoirist, and all around human being trying to make her way through a messy world. In writing that makes a reader want to keep turning the pages, Alexis uses her own journey to illustrate and educate on how every writer can find a path through classes, conferences, and even rejection to a more peaceful immersion in her own story—and, most importantly, how to get that story on the page.

[Sindhu S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Page has written a witty and insightful craft book. It tells you that not all writing runs according to schedules or deadlines. It is a testament to how messy life can be, how far thoughts can wander, and how fleeting success and contentment are. In short, it shows that writing is complicated.

She uses examples from her life to discuss
-learning and teaching writing
-navigating the murky waters of writing for a diverse audience
-dealing with incarceration, assault, rejection, and impostor syndrome
-writing the story despite (or because of) all the problems and obstacles in your path

Although the blurb says part memoir, part craft guide, in many places it reads like a thesis on other people’s essays and books. The book is full of thoughts that go off tangent and confuse you until they are herded back in to be connected somehow. Page also uses complicated words and jargon, which prompts you to leave the book and search for them.

Having said that, I loved the book. I may read it again.

Note: I received an advance review copy from BookSirens for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Terri McClean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book so much but it wasn't quite as well written as I has expected.

There were some good passages for sure and anyone who wants to know more about her journey to becoming a writer should enjoy it.

[Amie McCracken · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a mouth-watering example of fantastic creative nonfiction. I could not put this one down. It made me think. It made me drool over the stunning sentence construction and voice. I am suffering from intense imposter syndrome and am not sure when I will be able to write my own work again...though she admonishes that fiercely and would tell me to write anyways.

[Catherine Shields · Rating 5 out of 5]

Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make A Messy Literary Life by Alexis Paige (Vine Leaves Press, Feb. 2022) was written for writers like me who seek effective ways to learn the craft of writing, and yet who also struggle with focus and inattention. As someone who can relate to the ADHD-Inattentive Type diagnosis, I appreciated the story of how her diagnosis and the connection with the title for her book.
This entertaining book was a memoir as well as an instruction manual in how to write, and I was thoroughly entertained by the author’s stories and insights. How could I not relate to essays and stories of the author’s life, as she explored the different aspects of a writer’s journey? I nodded along in agreement in each section as she explored the challenges, successes, and failures that she met along the way.
Although I am coming into writing late in life, I enjoyed the way Paige braided stories about how her writing journey, how she offered advice about the craft as she included it with chapters about her personal life, including infidelity and first-time journalism jobs. I appreciated her honesty, her point of view that analyzes mistakes without the accompanying self-reproach, and the most important element of who we are writing for: our readers.

[Jessica Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great way to start the new year, reading a book by a like-minded messy creative. It really makes you realize that there is no right way to be a writer, and it is comforting to know it’s okay to be a little scattered in your approach to producing art. And who gives a fuck how long it takes you. And who gives a fuck whether it even gets finished. Writing is hard, as Alexis says, and we should stop hiding behind the romanticized image of writer bliss. Yes, there are blissful moments, but in general, it takes a goddamn long time to feel them, and they can’t be forced. I now feel rejuvenated to launch into this new year, reading and writing, when I can, when I want, without guilt or expectation.

PS: I cried when I read the part about ptsd as it awakened some realizations in me. This book will have a tendency to do that to you depending on what you have experienced in your own life.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Work Hard, Not Smart shows us what it takes to make art from chaos and inattention. An essential companion for all creatives struggling with their own messy creative lives.

Part inspiration. Part craft. Part memoir. Alexis Paige gives an intimate view of growing into and thriving with ADHD, as an adult.

Her fresh voice and honest perspective are so compelling that I didn't want to turn the last page. I feel like I could spend 100 more pages immersed in her stories.

A-must-read for artists, creatives, and writers.

[Billy Buttons · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was entered in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. This is what our readers thought:
Title: Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life
Author: Alexis Paige

Star Rating: 5 Stars
Number of Readers: 15
Stats
Editing: 10/10
Writing Style: 9/10
Content: 9/10
Cover: 5/5
Of the 15 readers:
15 would read another book by this author.
15 thought the cover was good or excellent.
15 felt it was easy to follow.
15 would recommend this book to another reader to try.
Of all the readers, 4 felt the author’s strongest skill was ‘subject knowledge’.
Of all the readers, 5 felt the author’s strongest skill was ‘writing style’.
Of all the readers, 6 felt the author’s strongest skill was ‘clarity of message’.
14 felt the pacing was good or excellent.
15 thought the author understood the readership and what they wanted.

Readers’ Comments
“What a fun book! I enjoyed the author’s approach to life; it is indeed messy. Very funny in parts, perfect for the disorganized author.” Male reader, aged 29
“Being a writer is so very difficult – and lonely too. This book helped me to feel better, that I’m not the only writer who’s not sitting by a lake in Italy with a glass of wine. The author’s writing is accessible but, best of all, she has excellent comic timing.” Male reader, aged 64
“I suspect many would call this a craft book, and it is – in a way! But it’s also a glimpse into the author’s life, the ups and many downs. There’s a very honest feel to the book which I think many readers will like. Compelling stuff.” Female reader, aged 55
“Interesting set of essays, often thought-provoking, just as often very funny. I must say, the author has lived a very interesting life.” Female reader, aged 37

To Sum It Up:
‘A fascinating and often very funny insight into the author’s life and her work. A FINALIST and highly recommended!’ The Wishing Shelf Book Awards

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This immensely humorous collection of essays by Alexis Paige manages to convince readers to do what seems impossible: not only accept ourselves, but revel in the quirks and non sequiturs of our uniqueness.

Cleverly titled to describe her often chaotic creative life, the book is technically about the craft of writing. But like Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Anne Lamotte’s “Bird by Bird,” the real gold nuggets are the insights Ms. Paige has experienced about herself. Despite an addiction problem, serving two months in prison for drunk driving and being diagnosed at the age of 40 with ADHD, the inattentive type, she’s managed not only to carve out a rich literary life as an associate professor at a small college in Vermont, but embrace every imperfect part of herself.

To Ms. Paige’s credit, she also includes a very thought-provoking essay about her passion for about social justice. From her position as a white writer, she wrangles with the blindnesses inherently held by those in our society’s dominant race regarding other races and ethnicities.

Very illuminating!

[xyZeereads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into, but I settled into the writing as the chapters progressed. Paige has done an excellent job of sharing her process—be it for writing, thinking, deconstructing, and manifesting—for what she calls her "creative nonfiction" work. Vignettes of her 60-day incarceration; her "toxic-whiteness" and how it affects her thinking and her writing; her awareness on racial prejudice and privilege and their detriment effect on everyday life. This may fly under the radar in the oversaturated publishing world, but I'm grateful to BookSirens for giving me the opportunity to read and review it.

[Michele Rios Petrelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, poignant and helpful. It's hard to find writing resources that speak to you but this one did entirely, although I didn't experience the same things. I experienced similar situations that resonated with me and made me feel better.

I also appreciated Paige's transparency on how you can't really write about "how to write," only that getting a sense of others writimg methods work for them and why helps navigate your own patterns and systems. Everyone is different.

I also like she added writing prompts at the end. I find these fun and resourceful.

[Jennifer Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life, Alexis Paige packs truth into every page whether she's writing about the prison system, racial inequality, addiction, the writer's/writing instructor's life, or the craft of memoir. As the book progresses, she gets closer and closer to her truth, to the reader, to revealing herself. At times, during certain passages, especially when describing the essence of good memoir writing, I found myself nodding my head.

[Carole Duff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays, a hybrid of craft guide (including an interview and book review) and memoir, often in the same chapter. My favorite: “Digging for Mud Bugs and Story Bones.” An enjoyable read.

[Melanie Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how this book blends writing craft with memoir.

Alexis Paige shares a wealth of writing, teaching, and life experiences that will resonate with readers interested in improving and supporting their own writing lives as well as with readers who appreciate candid and meaningful nonfiction about ADHD, trauma, identity, and many other topics.

For the writers, two of my favorite chapters are: "Writing is Hard, and It Takes a Long Time" and "Rejection Sucks and Then You Die." Another very resonant chapter on the writing life is: "The Hero Embarks on a Quest: Girl Writer Meets Boy Writer*." Also to savor for wonderful writing advice: "Remembering the Cockroaches: On Doubt in Creative Nonfiction."

For the readers who enjoy nonfiction, Alexis Paige covers a wide variety of topics, from marriage to moving to nature and humor, with lyrical prose that keeps the pages turning.

Wonderful appendix and resources section, too. You'll want to keep this book handy while writing, editing, and/or attending writing classes or programs.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it turned out pretty good.