FIFTH BRAIN COLLECTIVE
About FRANKIE ROLLINS
and the FIFTH BRAIN COLLECTIVE
The
Fairy Tale Version
Once upon a time, a witch came to an impasse. A plague had beset her world. People were dying in the hundreds of thousands. She lived in the hot desert and worked with increasingly desperate and troubled seekers through a shiny box. She was disappointed to find, due to the extreme trouble of the world, that the old ways could not be resumed. She had no answer to the question “What next?” for many months and even years until the answer came that she must change everything. She moved to a colder clime near family and began conducting new spells to change her life. She cast off a series of ideas that had shackled her, beliefs in civilizations’ hierarchies, systems, limitations, expectations, and assumptions. As if waking from a tight hot nightmare, she began a new practice of listening, discovering, and sharing possibilities. Now she invites seekers to become more themselves, uplifting creativity as one of the essential things that is needed at this moment in time. She's moved into the stream of invention. Her calculations, innovations, rants, and empowering jinxes have coalesced and a new creative community, the Fifth Brain Collective, has been born.
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After over 20 years of teaching creative writing within the regimes of K-12 schools and then as full-time community college writing faculty teaching hundreds of writers a year, Frankie Rollins needed a change. She decided to harness the digital tools that the pandemic unleashed to publish her guide to artistic confidence, offer coaching, and offer unusually tender and supportive online creative writing classes.
Frankie converses with seekers about creativity with an unflagging radiant warmth. She knows that creative people must access their personalities, knowledge banks, memories, lostness-and-foundness. They must know the obstacles and dreams within them to make their art and she has developed ways to help them move authentically, confidently, and joyously into their work.
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Writers seeking guidance often find formulaic how-to lists, but no formula fits every writer, nor does it apply to every stage of a writer’s life. What people have to say will change, and how they will write their texts will change, and it is from this loose footing that any person writes. To get the writing done, the method must be flexible and singular to each person. Frankie wrote Do You Feel Like Writing? to encourage that flexibility and give writers permission to examine the ingredients of their own experiences.
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Frankie previously published The Grief Manuscript, The Sin Eater & Other Stories, and a novella, Doctor Porchiat's Dream. The secret to Frankie's everlasting curiosity and sunshine is embedded in her commitment to writing anything she wants without quantifiable reason or expectation of external success. She writes because she loves to write and it is the way she makes sense of the world. She knows that she needs no other reason.
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The Fifth Brain Collective is a dream that she created with fellow writers, Sandra Shattuck and Eric Aldrich, joined now by many other creative beings. The Fifth Brain Collective has begun with Frankie's coaching and classes with an eye towards uplifting and sharing other classes by other creative folks with unusual offerings. Celebrating each individual brain, each set of knowledge banks naturally creates a collective of unique offerings and people. Check out the free class, get a discount on your next class, and stay tuned for innovative offerings to come!
Let’s Work Together
Get in touch, seekers.