What Barbra Streisand taught me about writing

...and how it led to a set of workshops on pop culture and creativity!

Happy New Year! Welcome to Writing with the Seasons, a collection of essays, ideas and writing prompts that follow the seasons, month by month.

For 2025, I’ll tell you how I find inspiration for my writing and the seasonal morning workshops I host: the two entwined parts of my creative work. (More on that here). My hope is you’ll take away a few things that will be useful for your own writing.

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‘And would we want anything less?’ writes Rachel Syme in The New Yorker about Barbra Streisand’s epic 1,000‑page memoir My Name Is Barbra.

My answer is no!

I loved every word and every moment spent reading Streisand’s book. For two weeks, I alternated between the heavy hardback and the audio version (with amazing archive recordings) narrated by the author—a mere 48 hours long. Streisand’s reading voice changes depending on her story: sometimes frustrated, sometimes confiding and soft, sometimes performing, laughing and singing.

I’m obviously a Barbra fan—I love her films especially—so I’m biased, but I have learned so much from her storytelling, her energy and her eager use of parentheses. So, because it’s January and it’s a dreamy, deeply reflective time, I give you my thoughts on what Barbra Streisand has taught me about writing.

Barbra Streisand by Steve Schapiro (1967)