Helen Betya Rubinstein in conv with Bennett Sims - Feels Like Trouble

Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program graduate Helen Betya Rubinstein will read from her new book, Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power, and will be joined in conversation with Bennett Sims. Bestselling author Vivian Gornick describes Feels Like Trouble as "a riveting indictment, shocking in its revelations of the pressure to conform to what the culture identifies as ‘good writing'", and De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of The Fervent Whites and In West Mills, praises Feels Like Trouble as a book that "removes the mask so many of us who teach in academia wear in the classroom." He continues with: "She writes about writing, and the practice, teaching, and evaluation of it, with honesty about her own experiences, humor, revelatory anecdotes, and a clear understanding of why the act holds so many different meanings for people. This is a great and necessary book."
Helen Betya Rubinstein is the author of two books, Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power (October 2026) and The Case Against Rubinstein: An Anti-Fiction (2027), both forthcoming from the University of New Orleans Press, plus a cult zine, Eat Like Helen, and a booklet of lyric fictions, Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song. A writing coach in ongoing practice with writers across genre, Helen is also on faculty at The New School (womenofletters.org/helen-betya-rubinstein/).
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the collection White Dialogues. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.