Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Raundi Moore Kondo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Raundi, appreciate you joining us today. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

As a writing coach, working remotely has added a tremendous benefit to my business. It has given me more flexibility and time to expand my writing curriculum. Working with writers of all ages has been my good fortune since 2009. Prior to March 2020, I drove hundreds of miles a week, throughout Orange County and Los Angeles, to meet with clients in their homes, offices, coffee shops, charter schools, education centers, book stores, libraries, and parks. It was exciting to work in different environments. Everyday was a surprise. However, the traffic and the time lost to commuting was weighing on me.

Transitioning to all remote meetings was a bit of an adjustment, but in the end it became a huge bonus. When working with younger students, being able to focus on the same online document leads to a more productive session, and I have found that many students are more engaged due to fewer distractions. Finding activities and exercises that work well online has been a process, but there is so much great content available online that I often have more options than I have time for. In case no one has noticed, video games (yes, you read that right!) and YouTube videos are wildly popular, so there is endless content we can use for inspiration, enrichment, and education. It becomes very easy to switch gears and tailor the time toward a client’s current needs and interests. If a client wants to write about horses, we are only a few keystrokes away from the perfect prompt, excellent information and endless cute horse photos for inspiration. If they need help understanding parts of speech or punctuation rules, there is a video game for that.

For my adult clients, remote meetings means more flexibility. We can reschedule appointments, as needed, and meet at nearly anytime of the day. Editing and collaborating are seamless via Zoom and Google doc, and so teaching someone how to self-publish a book, by walking them through the process, is streamlined and straightforward. Now that I have students living all over the world, from Shenzhen to Park City to Virginia Beach, virtual meetings have become essential.

Raundi, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Writing began as a guilty pleasure, I hid from my friends and family for years. Sharing my love of writing with others, providing a safe space, helping them find the confidence to share their work, and submit it for publication, or self-publish it, has become my passion. After facilitating a community workshops for homeschoolers for a year, I began receiving calls from panicked parents and depressed wannabe writers who didn’t know how to get the ball rolling.

My first clients were mostly reluctant writers. People who found writing painful or daunting seemed to gravitate toward me. Word-of-mouth spread and soon I had a full schedule. For about ten years I taught a weekly writing workshop in the back room of It’s A Grind in Mission Viejo. Every week was different. Writers ages 5 to 80 showed up with journals, and we wrote our hearts out. Countless poems, short stories, and multiple novels were born out of those workshops,

The turning point was when I began to publish all ages poetry anthologies (A Poet is A Poet No Matter How Tall Series and In Poetry We Believe). It was my mission to help new writers understand the process of submitting their work for publication. I was fortunate that a lot of great poets, some award winning, trusted me with their work. It’s still one of my greatest joys to help a writer become a published author.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

After publishing several poetry anthologies and then transitioning from an “in-person” coach into a “virtual” writing coach, I realized that my remote clients needed physical workbooks and journals to work in. A lot of the writing prompts I used to bring to in-person workshops were sadly missing from the remote meetings. So, I began the journey of publishing Creative Expression Workbooks that my students could utilize during our sessions or in their free time for fun and inspiration.

Over the years, I have learned that drawing and writing longhand promotes unexpected ideas and evokes a different voice from a writer. The workbook I’d dreamed up first, Pareidolia Practice, felt essential. It asks the writer to create, draw, and use their imagination to look for hidden images and messages in their own “abstract art” and then write about it. I’ve found these exercises promote lateral thinking (divergent thinking), they go deeper than the average writing prompt, and they can actually be used to solve personal problems and get at underlying emotions and buried memories.This has had a powerful impact on my clients and my own creative process.

Other titles in the Creative Expression series, like Metaphor Maker and Simile Simulator, promote poetic license and the use of figurative language, which are some of the toughest concepts for younger readers and writers to grasp. My most recent publication is a love letter to the OG’s of Poetry. Just Add Poetry: Lessons from the OGs is the workbook I am most proud of. As long as I have been teaching classic poets like Basho and Angelou, I have wanted to create a curriculum similar to the Meet The Masters art program taught in schools. I am extremely proud of all of our publications and look forward to future publications to promote the love of words and writing.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth has been my saving grace. I have many devoted clients who understand that my goal is to personalize every client meeting. Believing that every writer is unique, it is my goal to meet writers where they are and this creates a lasting bond. Being sensitive to a writer’s goals, insecurities, and recognizing their strengths is as important as knowing how to create an attention grabbing hook or book cover. Some of my clients have been meeting with me for years, and they feel like family in many ways. I am so grateful. They are my greatest cheerleaders and I am theirs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.theloveofwords.com/about.html
• Instagram: The Love of Words & RaundiKai
• Facebook: Raundi Kai Moore-Kondo

Image Credits
Boris Ingles, Raundi Moore Kondo, Robert Cavanaugh