Who Lit Your Way?
Celebrating the mentors who help us find our way
Mentors are the people who find us at the edge of what we know and offer just enough light to keep going. This week, I’m celebrating the teachers, editors, friends, guides, and fellow writers who help us see the path ahead and inviting us all to remember the beacons who helped us find our way.
I just celebrated my official 15th anniversary as a fiction author, and it doesn’t feel like that long ago that I was a shy author at my first convention trying to figure all this writer stuff out. Lucky for me, I stumbled into Jonathan Maberry’s Act Like a Writer workshop, and it gave me the direction I needed.
I was in the dark when I walked into that room. I left illuminated.
I had found a beacon. I didn’t know it then, but that moment would become part of a pattern: again and again, when I reached the edge of what I knew, someone appeared with a little more light.
This month we are celebrating mentors with our June theme: Light the Beacons.
A mentor is not just someone who gives advice. A good mentor appears when the path gets dim. They help us see the shape of the road ahead. They tell us the truth when we need truth. They encourage us when we are too close to our own work to see its worth. They can open doors, hand us a lantern and show us the way.
That is what mentorship does at its best.
The Lantern-Bearers Behind the Work
Literary history is full of these beacon moments. Harlan Ellison saw something in a young Octavia E. Butler and pointed her toward Clarion, where she found community, craft, and early publication. John W. Campbell Jr. became a complicated but formative editorial force for Isaac Asimov, encouraging, challenging, advising, and publishing work that helped shape twentieth-century science fiction. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien gathered with the Inklings, reading work aloud, offering criticism, and helping each other keep going until worlds like Narnia and Middle-earth could fully emerge.
None of those relationships meant the work became easy. Butler still had years of rejection ahead. Asimov still had to write the stories. Tolkien still had to finish the long road to Mordor.
What they did have was someone—or a circle of someones—who helped keep the lantern burning. We feel this intuitively, but the numbers tell the same story. We feel this intuitively, but the numbers tell the same story.
The Mentorship Gap
Research backs up what many of us already know from lived experience: mentorship matters, but many people still don’t have access to it. In a 2019 Olivet Nazarene University survey of 3,000 people, found that 76% of people believe mentors are important, while only 37% currently had one. That gap matters, especially for writers. (Forbes, 2019)
Creative work can be isolating. We spend so much time alone with our thoughts, our drafts, our doubts, and our strange little sparks of possibility. A mentor can help us protect that spark until it becomes something we can carry with confidence.
But mentorship is not passive. It is not simply finding someone wise and waiting for them to pour knowledge into us. The best mentoring relationships are active, reciprocal, and generous. We bring our questions and our willingness to be challenged. We bring our respect for the mentor’s time, energy, and experience. Eventually, we pay what we have learned forward to someone else. That is the beautiful cycle of mentorship: someone lights the way for us, and then we become part of the beacon line for another.
Celebrate the Beacons
This month, we’ll be exploring mentorship from several angles.
Next week, we’ll look at what a mentor is—and what a mentor isn’t. After that, we’ll talk about how to be an excellent mentee, because being mentored is not a passive skill. Then we’ll explore what happens when mentorship grows into something more: a calling, a service, and even a professional path.
For now, let’s celebrate those who lit the way for our creative journeys.
Maybe it was a teacher, editor, parent, friend, fellow writer, coach, reader, librarian, workshop leader, or someone who said one sentence at exactly the right time. Maybe they knew they were mentoring us, or maybe they have no idea how much they meant to us. Let’s tell them.
Celebrate them in the comments. Say their name.
Let’s shine a light on the beacons who helped us find our way.
This Week in the Ecosystem
🔥May 31 · Authortunities Press is officially live!
📅JUN 4 · The Authortunities Calendar has been updated.
🏆May 31 · Voting open for April & May Readers Choice Awards!
🎙️JUN 8 · Reading Space & Time “Signals Across the Dark · Issue 151”
Great post.
Glad you called out shortage of mentors. Here’s to keeping it real:
I went to a women’s conference in the mid 2000s specifically to attend a panel on mentorship held by a beloved and popular western US author (you have most definitely heard of her) and her mentee.
I asked at the Q&A “how does one find a mentor without being in a university program?” Which I thought was a fair question.
I was age 40 with two kids at home and needed something that could pull me out of my slump but couldn’t afford an MFA ($/time).
I needed a coach, for real. Someone outside my bubble. A helping hand. A booster.
The famous author scoffed and said, “you just don’t go shopping for one” like it was the most inane question ever in the history of asking for help.
I left more depressed than ever and literally humiliated and sick to my stomach. What a fucking deep-ass wound, totally undeserved.
Not only do I still harbor resentment for that privileged author and her insensitive statement, but I lost about 5 years of writing life to discouragement.
It wasn’t until I started attending an annual regional conference/retreat where the instructors cared about and supported my voice/vision/hard work did I get back on that horse.
That was when I realized mentors are everywhere even if/when they don’t intend it.
I can proudly say Wendy Call and Waverly Fitzgerald have been amazing mentors.
(I’ll never name the other author with her cold and useless reply; she can fuck right off.)
Jonathan Maberry was essential in getting my "career" off the ground. I took a few of his classes. And downloaded all the resources from his website—and they are many. He is such a generous person with his time. I don't know how he manages it all.
I did get an official mentor through the HWA. Leslie Lutz spent way too much of her time with me and helped me get a MG horror novel written. If anyone needs a great writing coach, hit me up and I'll put you in contact.
I am also fortunate to be living in the same city as Armand Rosamilia. He is quite like Jonathan Maberry in that he is a prolific author and generous with his time. He has written a ton of horror, but now writes mainly crime and thrillers. He has helped quite a few of us newbies—if I am allowed to call myself that at 65) through the ins and outs of publishing, both independent and traditional.