Search Results for 'I'
Maryam Diener: On Writing
At school in Iran, I was drawn to the works of the poet Forough Farrokhzad. Modernist and revelatory, her poetry was a turning point in the Iranian literary world. She used the written word to explore personal emotions in a world where it was taboo for women to write about their inner life. For hundreds […]
What Titles Tell Us
When I started writing my memoir almost ten years ago, I thought I was writing a story about our family breeding our Portuguese Water Dog, Spray, as our last family adventure before my older daughter, Maggie, left for college. I had kept a blog about the dog and puppies, at my husband’s suggestion, and about […]
Mining the Past to Understand the Present
By Margaret Ann Spence The mid-century, before the baby-boomers became teenagers and horrified their parents, was, it is said, a time of stifling conformity. Strange. That is not how I remember this time at all. So, I wrote a memoir to set the record straight. In writing Cold War in a Hot Kitchen: a memoir […]
Researching a Book in the Time of Covid, and What I Learned
By Pamela Toler One of the oddities of my career path as a writer of historical non-fiction is that I didn’t have the chance to do archival research for my first nine books. In some cases this was because I often had ridiculous deadlines, which did not leave time to hunker down in an archives […]
How I Develop My Characters
By nature, I am a people person, so, developing characters is where I begin when planning a story. Once the characters are created, the plot is built around them, not the reverse. So, how do I develop my characters? All my characters are based on people I have encountered in my career as a ladies’ […]
Prologues & Epilogues, Oh My!
by Abigail Owen I have heard over the years from various readers that they skip prologues or epilogues. Skip them? How? Why? Maybe that reader had a bad experience? Or just thinks that a prologue or epilogue is information they don’t need? Do prologues and/or epilogues fit with or enhance every single story? Or course […]
August: Reading With Rochelle Weinstein
Hello Readers & Friends, North Carolina is a memory, and we’re back in Miami where the days alternate between steamy sun and lots of afternoon showers. But who minds the rain when you have a great book on hand? Here’s what I read in August…all that plus edits for We Are Made of Stars! Here’s […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Cynthia Reeves
Cynthia Reeves’s novel The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Michelle McGill-Vargas
AMERICAN GHOUL You can’t kill someone who’s already dead. That’s what Lavinia keeps telling her jailer after—allegedly—killing her mistress, Simone Arceaneau. But how could Simone be dead when she was taking visitors shortly before? And why was her house always so dark? Lavina, a recently freed slave, met Simone, a recently undead vampire, by chance […]
Something New From Something Old – On Creating a Linked Story Collection
I grew up in a family of dedicated New Yorker readers, and my taste was formed early on by the stories of J.D. Salinger, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver. Decades of reading would pass before I started writing myself, but when I did, back in 2009, my hope was to publish a collection. A goal that seemed […]
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