We are a consultancy built by practitioners: working writers, artists, and educators whose own creative lives are inseparable from their teaching, mentoring and coaching.
We understand what it means to face a blank page, to lose the thread of an argument, to feel like your mind works differently from everyone around you — and to find, eventually, that the way your mind works is not the problem. It is the very source of your most original thinking.
Most writing instruction is still designed around a narrow idea of how minds work. Linear. Sequential. One-size.
Students and writers who don't fit that mold — neurodivergent thinkers, visual and design-forward minds, people whose intelligence moves associatively or nonlinearly — are too often told, implicitly or explicitly, that they need to be fixed before the real work can begin.
We built Lucida around the opposite belief. Accessibility and neurodiversity-affirming practice are not accommodations we offer on the side. They are foundational to everything we do, with every client, at every level. We have spent decades developing strategies that work with the full range of how people actually think — not the narrow range that most classrooms were designed for.
Her gift is helping people who have been told — by education, by diagnosis, by institution — that their mind works "wrong," discover that their way of thinking isn't the obstacle to good writing. It is the very source of it.
Rebekah Edwards is a writer, educator, and accessibility specialist whose practice spans more than two decades of work with undergraduate and graduate scholars and creative professionals in academic and creative fields. As Associate Professor of Critical Pedagogies in CCA's undergraduate and graduate programs, she has spent her career at the intersection of rigorous scholarship and genuinely inclusive teaching — developing specialized expertise in neurodiversity-affirming instruction for students with ADHD, dyslexia, autism spectrum differences, and trauma-related learning needs across online, hybrid, and in-person environments.
She runs workshops for institutions on inclusive pedagogy in its fullest sense — neurodivergent learners, ELL students, queer and trans communities, and the full range of creative and nonlinear minds. She mentors faculty in short and long-term relationships, coaches graduate students across the full arc of academic projects from a single chapter to a completed dissertation, and has recently extended her practice to homeschool instruction and college application coaching for younger writers finding their voice.
Her accessibility work has been recognized with the NEH Accessible Futures Fellowship (UCLA, 2015), the Ruth Masako Award for outstanding accommodation of students with disability needs, and the Elisabeth Siekhaus Faculty Achievement Award for excellence in teaching and responsiveness to a diverse student body — the latter are both faculty- and student-voted awards and being honored by those communities is something she cherishes.
Rebekah holds a Ph.D. in English with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality from UC Berkeley and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Australian Feminist Studies, Image and Narrative, Rhetoric, Politics and Culture, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, among other peer-reviewed journals. Her poetry book Then's Elsewhere (Redwood Coast Press, 2010) received the Redwood Coast Book Award. She writes across fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, and brings a practitioner's fluency to every coaching relationship.
Work with Rebekah →Her gift is working with creative and design-forward minds — people who think visually, associatively, or nonlinearly — and helping them find the forms and structures that let their ideas do justice to their thinking.
Saraleah Fordyce is a painter, educator, and essayist who brings an artist's deep understanding of process to every teaching and mentorship relationship. Senior Adjunct in Critical Studies at California College of the Arts — where she has taught in the MFA Design program since 2011 — she has spent her career working at the intersection of visual practice, design thinking, and pedagogy. She has a particular fluency with creative and design-educated minds: students and professionals whose thinking moves through images, systems, and spatial intuition, and who need a mentor who recognizes that intelligence for what it is rather than asking it to become something else.
She works with graduate students in MBA and MFA design programs, serves as a leadership and pedagogical coach for school leaders and educators navigating complex institutional environments, and supports nonprofits and organizations in developing their written voice and communications capacity. As a consultant, her clients have included California College of the Arts, the University of San Francisco, Mills College, and The Nueva School, among others. She is also a regular contributor to Design and Culture, where her critical writing engages questions of representation, pedagogy, and design practice.
Her own sustained studio practice — and more than a decade of writing about design for professional audiences — give her a rare credibility with clients whose creative identity is inseparable from their intellectual one. She graduated first in her class from Boston University's College of Fine Arts, holds an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, and has been recognized with the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Grant and a nomination for the New School's Distinguished University Teaching Award.
Work with Saraleah →We have built our practices around a conviction that most pedagogy still hasn't absorbed: effective teaching doesn't just accommodate different kinds of minds — it is designed by and for them from the start.
This isn't a specialty we offer on the side. It is embedded in how we structure every session, draft every workshop, and approach every writer who arrives unsure whether the problem is the work or the way they've been taught to do it.
We are also both practicing writers and artists. That isn't incidental — it is what makes our coaching different from tutoring. We know what it means to face the blank page, to lose the thread, and to find your way back.
If any of this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.
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