Category: Contemporary Women Writers
The Journey That Inspired Camel from Kyzylkum by Lara Gelya
I was born and raised in Ukraine during the Soviet era, in a world shaped by discipline, endurance, and quiet resilience. My childhood was a complex mosaic. Life was certainly not easy, and the shadow of antisemitism was a heavy, painful reality we had to navigate. Yet, in our neighborhood, Jewish and Ukrainian families lived […]
About a Boy By Tara Badstubner
Ask me how I came to write of loss and grief. Ask me at night when I’m especially tired, when my guard is down, when my heart is heavy from the slow grind of the day. I will tell you a story, maybe, about a boy, a friend, who was goofy and kind. His gait […]
October Recommended Reads
Engineering a Love Story, Kathleen Reidy At the height of the boom, ambition is easy —love is the real gamble It’s the year 2000—dot-coms, Bush v. Gore, and sky-high San Francisco rents. But while the country swoons with irrational exuberance, Chelsea Lefevre’s life is deflating faster than a tech bubble. She’d had everything she thought she […]
Write What You Know … or Don’t by Liz Flaherty
As writers, we hear it from everyone—from other writers, from people who teach writing, from readers, and from people who are tired of hearing us groan and whine about writing. (Little do they know how much fun groaning and whining is if you’re sharing it with sympathetic listeners.) Write what you know, they say. It’s […]
The Unlearning Project by M.D. Roblyer
In her memoir-how-to book The Memoir Project, author Marion Roach Smith archly observes that “the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves.” She’s sold a lot of copies being right about that. I joined that white-haired throng after retiring from a long career in higher education and, […]
Because I Have Lived It by Joanne E. Betzler
Joanne E. Betzler – author of Nothing to Discuss – Breaking From 20 Years of Intimate Partner Violence I grew up believing that abuse means visible scars and bruises. Broken bones. There was zero physical evidence that my 20-year marriage had swallowed me whole and erased my identity. From my insider perspective, the union was […]
Was It Worth It? A Journey of Leaving, Losing and Becoming by Maryam Rafiee
As a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a cycling champion, but there was no women’s team at the time. Cycling in public was also forbidden for women. I cycled through the streets of Tehran wearing loose jogging clothes and a cap, trying to look like a boy so I would not be stopped by the morality […]
It’s a Dog’s Life by Leslie Kain
I hadn’t had a dog in my life since Maddie, the golden retriever that grew up with my kids. But after my husband and I recently said goodbye to our eighteen-year-old cat Sheba (who’d become blind, and sat beside me in my writing chair, often walking on my keyboard), it was time to again welcome […]
Remembering 9/11 By Caroline Bock, Author of The Other Beautiful People
This year, tomorrow, 9/11, falls on a Friday. For me, 9/11 will always be a Tuesday. Twenty-five years ago, I woke up early after a sleepless night. I had a big day. Bravo cable network was holding a press conference at a swanky hotel downtown for our first reality series – The It Factor, and […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Melissa Payne
IN THIS LIFE OR ANOTHER On the brink of death, a man comes to terms with the life he lived versus the one he never pursued in an emotionally rich novel of parallel lives, redemption, and finding purpose. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, mechanic Rusty Wilson takes a bullet to save the patrons […]































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