von Ersun Warncke | Juni 11, 2025 | Uncategorized
Opening the door to your mind College application essay season is getting underway and I’m looking forward to coaching a new cohort of brilliant teenagers as they craft personal narrativesBrainstorming is crucial to this process, and I love creating fun exercises to...
von Ersun Warncke | Juni 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
Five ways writing enhances professional successA friend of mine who is a performance and intelligence consultant (i.e., crunches numbers then tells executives how to recruit, plan, and deploy budgets) told me his recent posting is likely to be extended because...
von Ersun Warncke | Mai 27, 2025 | Uncategorized
Finding answers within, and between, the lines“No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.” ~ Matsuo BashoSeventeenth-century poet and Zen Buddhist Basho was an extraordinary poet whose...
von Ersun Warncke | Mai 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
Creativity, conformity and keeping yourself realI wanted to see The Face: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery badly enough to plan a trip to London around it. Booked flights. Bought an NPG annual membership. Found a house sitter. Arranged meetings....
von Ersun Warncke | Mai 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
Helping exceptional students excel Why do some intellectually exceptional students fail to excel?Our hyper-mechanistic, Social Darwinian culture tends to assume — ignoring millennia of evidence — that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. Yet we see...
von Ersun Warncke | Mai 10, 2025 | Uncategorized
“Once in a dry season…”This week, Substack has loomed over me like a, well, smokestack. Every time I look up it’s there, towering, casting a shadow.There are plenty of times I feel short on writing inspiration, plenty of times it takes effort to get...
von Ersun Warncke | Apr. 30, 2025 | Uncategorized
‘The Weight’ I write an awful lot about writing in this newsletter, but it occurs to me I rarely share my own creative work. So, this week, I’d like to highlight an essay that was published in the literary journal Syncopation. While I trust the writing to...
von Ersun Warncke | Apr. 23, 2025 | Uncategorized
How stories shape our worldThe last two books I read were Andrea Dworkin’s debut, Woman Hating and Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks.The conjunction was coincidence — the former had arrived in the post (thanks Awesome Books), the latter had been lurking...
von Ersun Warncke | Apr. 16, 2025 | Uncategorized
The secret to successful sentencesOne of the things that overwhelms writing students — especially younger ones — is sheer quantity of options. English is a lexis-rich language whose straightforward grammar allows for endless variations. These facts are the joy and...
von Ersun Warncke | Apr. 8, 2025 | Uncategorized
How narrative wins the numbers game I recently wrote about the importance of self-narratives to internal achievements like growth, healing and resilience. Today, let’s look at the role of self-narrative in successes such as winning the elite college admissions...
