Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Six Books in Three Years: An Indie Publishing Journey By Susan Cushman
The quickly changing world of book publishing can be a difficult terrain to traverse for a new writer. After spending a decade “prepping” for this leg of the journey by writing and publishing essays in various journals and magazines and building a platform on social media, I was finally ready to publish a book. And […]
Why Storytelling Matters
One of the important things I’ve learned over the course of my long career as an academic administrator is that we define ourselves as human beings through storytelling. After I retired, I became inspired to write my own life’s story, resulting in my first book, Where the Water Meets the Sand. The experience of writing my memoir […]
Memoir Writing Tips
I confess I’ve become a compulsive participant in memoir writing workshops. My first one was with Joyce Maynard in Guatemala in 2014, and my own memoir was born there under the volcanoes. Five years later, it will be published on October 1st. Listening to the authors sharing those drafts of memoirs in the writing circle […]
Psychology and Writing
The connections I’ve made, and resisted, between my career as a psychologist and my career as a writer have shifted over time. For many years, I felt the pull between my work as a psychologist and my desire to write as a constant conflict. I spent a considerable amount of time studying, working to get […]
Me And My Agent by Holly Seddon
Where to start? To be frank, I can’t think of another job like literary agent. It sits in the Venn diagram of creativity, inspiration, career management and business acumen. But that doesn’t really explain it. A good agent helps shape ideas, offers editorial notes on outlines and manuscripts, pitches novels to publishers and then argues […]
Longing for Treasure
By Sandra A. Miller Sometimes I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. There were always brown bag lunches to prepare and a pile of papers to grade, kids to drive to music lessons and weekends crammed with soccer games—so many soccer games. I couldn’t even tell where my own needs began and ended. I read Eat Pray […]
Who Is The Inspiration?
Nervous, scared, anxiously looking around the room, feeling like every word you say is being judged. This are recognisable feelings in everyone, and that is before you start to share your writing. But I’m not talking about the new writing students here, those who are determined to fill a lifelong ambition and who embark on […]
Self-belief vs Self-delusion
“One of the hardest parts of writing is walking that line between self-belief and self-delusion.” I spotted this tidbit on Twitter the other day and it struck a chord with me. As writers, we often hear talk of a lack of self-belief as the “imposter syndrome.” Most of us experience it, if not on a daily […]
On Being A Bookseller
When I was a little girl, I could not learn to read. My first-grade class was part of an experimental group that was learning to read by colors (I still remember that magenta was the “schwa” sound.) Apparently, I was not the only one for whom this was a complete failure. I have never met […]
Writing The Art Of Happy Moving
How to Make Moving a Happier Experience – Yes, For Real I never aspired to be a moving expert because, seriously, who would want to do that? Yet, my husband, Dan, and I moved ten times in eleven years. As much as I would like to pretend that we’re free spirits who go where the […]
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