My name is Alex Hester. I’m an MFA graduate from University of Alaska Anchorage, which is where I met and worked with Barry just a few, glorious years back.
We’ve definitely got different styles of approaching, writing, and evaluating stories and literature in general, and our diversity of thought and life experience often helped us to improve our writing. Well, it’s been helpful for my writing, anyway — I won’t speak for Barry.
My love for writing stems originally from a childhood love of books, The Pagemaster, and story-based video games. My love of editing, however, was birthed in my teenage years by the realization that sometimes my friends (or their parents) would pay me to edit their writing. As both a tutor and a college educator I have spent a huge amount of my time over the past few years editing and improving my students’ writing and skills.
More recently, I’ve worked with some magazines a bit, publishing an article with Faerie Magazine (now Enchanted Living), and currently working as a prose editor for Alaska Women Speak magazine.
I’m pretty new to Medium, but I’m excited to work alongside Barry and Jim on The Craft of Fiction to see how we can combine what we know and how we look at things to help other writers with their craft.