I was born in Istanbul and grew up in England, Nigeria, and the USA. Chasing stories, I spent a few years wandering through the halls of George Mason University, traveling the world through the corridors of literature and the pages of books, finding a home for my stories in notebooks. I set off in search of adventure and learned how to teach at Bilkent University. I got married, had a son, and journeyed through entirely different worlds with Reiki, EFT, and past-life regression therapy. I founded a space called Yazı Evi (The Writing House), and when that wasn’t enough, we opened up to the world with Sanal Yazı Evi (The Virtual Writing House). My stories became three books, and I called each of them “my children.” The road didn’t end there; life brought me at 57 to Germany to write a new story. I keep chasing, listening to and writing stories, and my passion is still in helping others write theirs.
I’m Yeşim (Yeahsheem) Cimcoz (Jimjoes) and I will be with you on this writing journey. At around fifty, I understood that for years writing had kept me sane. When life became meaningless, confusing and chaotic, writing was what centered me. It not only kept me sane, it in many ways created me, helped me let go of, hold on to, shape and accept who I was.
Today writing is my career path. I have been teaching creative writing for over 20 years. Mostly, I teach online now.
I know that writing from a deeper place within seems like so much work. It would be so much easier if there was a structure you could work with, some rules you could follow and everything would fall into place on its own. But really good, deep, meaningful writing rarely comes from that. Writing is process not product. Somewhere along that process it is highly possible that something will present itself to you as a product. My hope is that as you work through the self paced workshop on this site you will forget time, embark on a journey of discovery and surprise and everything that comes from this will have sown the seeds for stories you are excited to write. Then all the technical stuff, all the rules, the rights and the wrongs will become suggestions not musts.
I hope you lose yourself in the writing, that time flies by and you find you just want to keep writing all the time. And I hope you discover the power of stories that come from deep within because that those are the stories you don’t need to work so hard to create.
Welcome and I hope you have a good journey.
Yeşim