Robyn Carter Writer, Editor & Educator

Writing, Editing & Graphics

Essays, Articles & Reviews   Web Content, Copywriting & Graphics   Nature & Science Writing   Pitch Decks   

Email Marketing, Business Plans & Press Releases  Social Media

Essays, Articles & Reviews

Teachers & Writers Magazine, Cozy Ripples, Playboy, KQED In the Classroom

Teachers & Writers Magazine •

Let There Be Light!

When I started a fifth-grade writing workshop 20 years ago, I fired a lot of shots in the dark before I hit on an effective approach to teaching imagery-writing strategies, especially when it came to rendering sense of sight.

The prompts and feedback I used to offer in efforts to guide my students’ descriptions of what they or their characters see would generate laundry lists––i.e., I see a dog and a car and a sidewalk––more often than the vivid and dynamic sentences I was hoping for.
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

Why Hurts Is a Verb: A 14 Million Year-Long Story

It’s February 2020, one of our last weeks in the classroom before everything turns inside out, but we don’t know this yet. I am a writer in residence at a public elementary school that serves San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. A San Francisco Arts Commission grant funds my residency, part of an initiative to place poets and fiction writers in public schools, community centers, and jails to lead creative writing workshops. I’m about to teach––and learn––my most difficult lesson as an educat
Cozy Ripples •

PHYSICAL Streaming on Apple+

A disturbing, but delicious ‘80s flashback featuring shiny fashion and big hair, a Season 2 nod to Richard Simmons, and an honest and nuanced look at the psychosocial forces that feed an eating disorder.

Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) is a frustrated housewife who relies on heavy doses of ballet and bulimia to dull the blades of an especially ‘80s SoCal spin on the Feminine Mystique. When dance class is canceled, she finds salvation in the newborn aerobics craze, but success is not easy.
Playboy •

Strippers Unite: Exotic Dancers at the Bargaining Table

“Two, four, six, eight, don’t come here to masturbate!” sounds like something the Moral Majority chanted back in the Eighties outside a porn palace, but the slogan was our battle cry for fair treatment on the job. We had formed a picket line outside the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco nude theater that employed us as dancers, to demand better working conditions and to organize the nation’s first successful strippers’ union.
The Bureau Dispatch •

From Fifty-One to Eleven

When you were five the sky looked so enormous it was invisible. Then your big-kid eyes grew in at nine and you saw its shortcomings in a documentary about the Apollo Missions. From space, it’s nothing really, just a webby membrane coating the world in a thin, blue hum. Back then you didn’t think about how it’s all that separates us from never-ending darkness.

But now that you’re eleven, you do. You’re hardly a kid anymore. You know the same amount of math most grown-ups do: enough to figure out
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

The Poetry of Prepositions

As a San Francisco WritersCorps Teaching Artist in Residence, I spent the last six years teaching creative writing workshops to third, fourth, and fifth-grade second-language learners at a public elementary school that serves the City’s Tenderloin neighborhood. I’m always scouting out engaging ways to integrate lessons on syntax and mechanics into creative projects, and when I discovered Robert Burleigh’s poetry picture book Hoops, I scored!

My class was full of basketball fans who had also bee
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

Escaping the Revision Trap

The kids in my upper-elementary writing workshops all hate revision. In fact, they seem to have blocked the word out of their Mindcrafty minds. Whenever I mention “revising,” I get blank stares. If I press the kids to jostle their memories, some might offer up explanations like, “That’s where you fix the red underlines.”

When I remind them that Grammarly is not going to save them here, that revision is something actual humans still need to do by hand and brain, that it’s way more about making m
KQED In the Classroom •

The Google Docs Table Feature: A Teacher's Swiss Army Knife

Here’s what the table actually looks like with borders showing so you can visualize (it’s actually only the left box that’s empty):

Once the table is set up, ask students to click their names and write responses in comments boxes, like this:

Workshopping student drafts--presenting works in progress for peer critique--is a key component of writing workshop, but it is also the most easily derailed. When I first started teaching, workshopping student writing meant an oral class discussion, often
KQED In the Classroom •

The STEAM-Powered Writing Workshop

The writing workshop has been at the heart of my upper-elementary classroom since I began teaching years ago, but the tech tools my students use to publish their work have evolved with the times. In recent years, Plasq’s ComicLife has become an indispensable digital addition to my students’ writing toolkit. What, at first glance, may look like a few motivating bells and whistles has, for me, become essential and transformative. ComicLife is ideal for the differentiated classroom. I rely on it
KQED In the Classroom •

A Concrete Approach to Teaching Revision: “Sensory Mapping” with Google Docs

After a writing conference with me about his opening, Daniel added the table below to map out the moment where his hero first acquires his superpowers. He began with boxes for each of the five senses, then zoomed in further on the sense of touch, adding a smaller table inside the sense of touch box where he wrote about how four of his hero’s individual body parts felt or reacted.

After adding details to his sensory map, Daniel then copied and pasted key sentences from his table into a unified p

Web Content, Copywriting & Graphics

Landing & About Pages, Product Descriptions, Blogs

Web page content •

Letter from the Founder

The world is drowning and the world is burning. By 2050, up to 200 million people could be displaced by climate change. Half of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years. By mid-century, as many as 30 to 50 percent of the total species found on Earth now will be gone because our extinction rate is currently 1,000 times the natural rate.

As we leave deadly marks on the only place in the universe we know humans can actually survive, we are nonetheless finding tools to help reverse the damage, but we are using the same tools to erase our humanity.
About Page •

Insomnius

Part curator, part caretaker, part keeper of keys, Insomnius lurks in the shadows of the lair bearing his name. Visitors catch glimpses of the sleep-starved artist now and then –– at work on a new piece for the collection, mopping up messes, restocking vending machines, or maybe tweaking the angles at which the artworks hang –– leaving clues about a past that keeps him up at night and fuels a ceaseless compulsion to depict a future he fears. His chronic exhaustion threatens his grasp on reality
Chrysalys Email Campaign •

A Cure for Onism

Welcome Human,

Specializing in limited edition art and custom projects, Chrysalys is a team of seasoned creatives
dedicated to transforming spaces. Our passion is crafting visual experiences that challenge perception and
spark curiosity. Often labeled surreal, we see our aesthetic as less adjective and more verb: explore,
wonder, reflect, transform. Innovation and craftsmanship drive our commitment to delivering work that
resonates with our clients.
Web Copy & Graphics - About Us Page •

How We Got So Hellbent

Hellbent Beauty is the brainchild of Kim and Bunny, a mother-daughter duo who share an obsession with lip gloss and a passion for time travel. Not the sci-fi kind (though that is cool too), but the kind where a color, word, or smell can teleport you back to your childhood, or 8th grade, or your first marriage, or the Trump presidency, or like two months ago when that one annoying meme was a thing while you had Covid.

You may not actually want to relive moments from your past, but here at Hellbe
Connecticut Community Foundation Impact Story •

Grassroots Community-Building Seeds Shelter for Naugatuck Valley’s Housing-Insecure

In one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, the Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP) tackles the need for quality, affordable housing. Founded in 1983, NVP’s first success was the construction of 102 cooperative housing units. Since then, the organization has grown to include 23 congregations, labor unions, housing cooperatives, and community organizations committed to NVP’s mission of building “a broad-based organization for change that is initiated, organized, and led by low-income communities, working families, and people of color.”

Through decades of organizing and advocacy, Naugatuck Valley Project has found that successfully advocating for access to physical resources like shelter requires intangible but momentous shifts in attitude among municipal leaders in the towns NVP serves.

Nature & Science Writing

Women's Health Blog •

Gut-Hormone Axis: Why Menopause Can Upset Everything in Orbit & How to Reset Your Spin

Whether your menopause journey is hot and flashy, bloated and belly-bulging, brittling your bones, harming your heart, shredding your sleep, or fogging your brain, chances are an imbalanced microbiome is to blame.

The gut microbiome is the collection of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live inside our GI systems. Our reproductive tracts have their own microbiome too. The population and diversity of a microbiome’s flora not only support the health of the organs they live in but also affect immu
Medium •

Supplements for Menopause: A Data-driven Look at a Witch’s Brew of Potions, Lotions & Teas

Menopause can be a rocky transition for many women. As estrogen levels decline, these hormonal shifts can result in several troubling symptoms, including hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, osteoporosis, vaginal dryness, loss of sex drive, weight gain, belly fat, and unhealthy lipid profiles.

Hormone therapy with synthetic estrogen is one approach to treating symptoms like these, but one that can increa

Pitch Decks

Email Marketing, Business Plans & Press Releases

Chrysalys Email Campaign •

A Cure for Onism

Welcome Human,

Specializing in limited edition art and custom projects, Chrysalys is a team of seasoned creatives
dedicated to transforming spaces. Our passion is crafting visual experiences that challenge perception and
spark curiosity. Often labeled surreal, we see our aesthetic as less adjective and more verb: explore,
wonder, reflect, transform. Innovation and craftsmanship drive our commitment to delivering work that
resonates with our clients.
Press Release •

Awake for a Cause: Insomniac Artist Promotes Green Justice with Surreal Dreamscapes

New Kickstarter Campaign Aims to Unite Environmental Nonprofits, Artists, and Eco-Conscious Collectors

On November 16th, West Coast-based artist and insomniac David Fenton announced the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to fund what he calls “an immersive, narrative-driven art experience” consisting of an online gallery and eCommerce platform where a collective of conscious creatives will showcase and sell their

Social Media Content & Graphics