Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Three Goals of a Great Story
By Jane Kirkpatrick Some years ago, at a conference called the Festival of Faith and Writing, I heard Joyce Carol Oates speak about what makes a great story. This multi-published and award-winning author of a National Book Award Book, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and so many more accolades, named three things. A great […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Shirley Russak Wachtel
The Baker of Lost Memories From the author of A Castle in Brooklyn comes an epic novel spanning decades about the broken bonds of family, memories of war, and redemption and hope in the face of heartbreaking loss. Growing up in 1960s Brooklyn, Lena wants to be a baker just like her mother was back in Poland […]
On Writing Mrs. McPhealy’s American
by Claire R.McDougall “Every village has its idiot. Locharbert in Scotland had three.” This is the opening line of my novel “Mrs. McPhealy’s American,” and I think in those couple of lines the tenor of the book is set. I grew up in Scotland in a wee town like Locharbert, and then, like Steinbeck did […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Christine Stringer
Charity Trickett is Not So Glamorous Bridget Jones fans will fall hard for this based-on-a-true-story, behind-the-scenes tale of a young woman’s calamitous adventures trying to break into the movie industry in 1990s Hollywood. Hollywood, 1997. When Charity Trickett moves to LA to assist the director of the biggest blockbuster film of the year, she quickly […]
The English Masterpiece, by Katherine Reay: Excerpt
The English Masterpiece “Art . . . London . . . Seventies Glam . . . Yesss, please. The English Masterpiece by Katherine Reay has ALL the goodies–especially for historical fiction lovers and art aficionados . . . Buckle your seatbelt as all hell breaks loose.” –Lisa Barr, New York Times bestselling author of The Goddess of Warsaw Set in […]
Searching for Home Between Laughs, Deadlines, and the 1 Train
By Sara Hamdan I didn’t set out to write a novel. Not at the start. My first piece for The New York Times was about the rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East. I was on assignment in Dubai, wearing my journalist hat—sleuthing out the funniest voices across the region, asking serious questions like, […]
Writing Through the Wreckage: How I Turned My Trauma Into a Memoir That Set Me Free
By Brooke Deanne, Author of Shattered, Broken & Beautiful I never set out to write a memoir. I set out to survive. To simply make sense of the shattered, and broken pieces of my life. To piece myself back together after years of religious oppression, narcissistic abuse, childhood trauma, and deeply buried sexual abuse that […]
Stories, and the Unexpected Garden Path
By Juliet Greenwood The book I’m working on at the moment is based around a garden. That’s not surprising, as most of my stories involve gardens in one way or another – after all, my first published novel is called Eden’s Garden, and you can’t get more garden than that! Until this year, I wasn’t […]
The Lost Book of First Loves, by RaeAnne Thayne: EXCERPT
THE LOST BOOK OF FIRST LOVES From New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne comes a brand-new story about two women, a family secret and a lost manuscript that changes everything… Raised by her literary icon father Carson Wells, Alison Wells always felt loved, even though her mother died when she was a teen. But when she […]
Writing Through Grief: The Journey of Higher Love
In November 2021, I embarked on my fourth novel, Higher Love, during the whirlwind of NaNoWriMo, fueled by the ambition to release it by early 2023. That dream, however, was deferred by life’s relentless challenges—relocation, loss, and profound grief. After a long, difficult road, Higher Love finally met readers on May 12, 2025. The delays […]
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