Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Have Attitudes Towards Women Really Changed Since 1900?
Journalist Caroline McGhie got to explore Victorian attitudes to women’s rights, sexual freedom, religion, art and pornography when writing her debut novel The Sitter. But has anything changed since 1900? How a woman copes after she has been taken advantage of has long been a subject of interest for writers of women’s fiction. More recently […]
’How’s Your Book Doing?’ and Other Post-Publication Questions
By Lorraine Devon Wilke Every step in the process of birthing a book has a life of its own: Imagining the book. Writing the book. Editing the book. Querying the book. Not querying the book. Publishing the book. Celebrating the publishing of the book. Then marketing and promoting the book. And marketing and promoting the […]
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 […]
Author Karen Nelson interviews Lindsay Williams from The Sunken Town
THE SUNKEN TOWN If you admit one truth, what else will you have to acknowledge? Lindsay, a thirty-year-old California native, never gave much thought to being adopted. When she unexpectedly inherits her birth mother Claire’s farmhouse in Maine, she is plunged into a journey across the country and across the years into a lake of […]
The Martians Never Came, But Quito Still Went to War
By Lorena Hughes Humans have always been fascinated by other worlds, particularly by the possibility of life on Mars and the question of whether such beings might visit us one day. Nowhere was this fascination more evident than in 1940s and 1950s pop culture: pulp magazines and comics filled with alien encounters, songs like the […]
The Myth of the Maligned Woman
By Louisa Morgan As a girl, I devoured many books based on the Arthurian legends—A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Crystal Cave, The Once and Future King, and so on. Recently, someone mentioned Morgan le Fay to me, and my memories of all those wonderful tales resurfaced. As a historical novelist, I naturally […]
Finding My Voice By Rikki West
Finding My Voice By Rikki West “You slip the voice back and forth from adult narrator to the child perspective,” my first editor pointed out after reading a few chapters of The Empty Bowl. She showed me how the use of “Daddy” instead of “my father” could change the entire tone of a sentence. At […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Janis M. Falk
NOT YET LOST For fans of Kristin Hannah and Jennifer Chiaverini, a novel about a Polish immigrant woman who fights against worker oppression in Depression-era Detroit despite opposition by many—even her own husband. In this gritty, cinematic story, hardworking Florence and her best friend, Basia, are enraged by the poor treatment, low wages, and unsafe […]
A Week in Berlin: A Novel of Fate, Survival and the Shadows of History
By Angelina Der Arakelian The Inspiration Behind the Story The idea for A Week in Berlin came to me when I started to contemplate my great-grandfather’s survival of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 – a story so improbable that it has always felt like both a miracle and a burden of fate. As the family […]
There Is No Spoon
By Barbara Bos Hans Bos, my father, passed away on Monday, Sept 1st. I’ll miss him terribly, but he left behind art and plenty of inspiration. I wrote this piece about him last year. Dag lieverd…xox June 27, 2024 I’m not sure if I’m ready for this. I’ve just sat down in my window seat, […]
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