Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Living the Reality, Adjusting the Dream By Mary Keliikoa
When I was young, I dreamt of a big wedding. Long white dress. Cascading bouquet of white flowers. A church full of my closest friends and family, and of course saying I do to my best friend and soulmate. I had it all planned out. The reality was when I did fall in love with […]
Literary Daydreaming
When I was younger and upset about something, my mother would sometimes encourage me to take the long view. Although she was talking about perspective, of course ‒ that, in a few days, whatever slight I felt wouldn’t matter so much ‒ my younger self took her words quite literally. I’d go stand outside on […]
A chosen exile, By Jennifer Steil
It feels appropriate to suddenly find myself and my 10-year-old daughter exiled from our home in Uzbekistan while launching a novel about exile—although our situation is far more fortunate than that of my characters. They flee the Nazis in Vienna to find refuge in Bolivia, the only country that will let them in, and have […]
Female Connection And Inspiration
Writers are often asked: “What was the inspiration for your book?” and their responses are, not surprisingly, all over the map. Some writers take their inspiration from a specific place or event. For others, it comes from something they read or watch. I’ve even heard of a few that were inspired by a particular smell. […]
Believe In You By Anju Gattani
Stories don’t just fall from the sky like shooting stars, right? Wrong. When Duty and Desire fell in my lap 19 years ago, it wasn’t an idea, a concept or a seed. Not even a fruit that fell from a tree. But a scene that harpooned my soul. We had moved from Singapore to New […]
Making Nonfiction Your Own By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
It’s tempting to say that every book is like your first, but the very good news is that it’s not. Having just published my sixth book, I’ve seen your future—if you’re anywhere between books one and five—and I can assure you that it does get easier. It never gets easy, of course. And every one […]
What Running a Bookshop Taught Me About Writing By Natalie Jenner
By Natalie Jenner Four years ago, I realized my lifelong dream of opening a small bookshop near the shore of Lake Ontario, in an idyllic and vibrant downtown community. For someone who had long ago given up trying to get published, yet still craved a way to make books a bigger part of her daily […]
Footnotes in History
Footnotes in History We traveled through the Bear River Valley in the forenoon . . . (it) is tolerably fertile and looks as if it might be well adapted to raising wheat. During the afternoon our road over the mountains was quite slippery in consequence of light showers which fell at intervals during the day. […]
Five Books by Women Writers I’ve Read More Than Once And Why
By Jill McCroskey Coupe, author of BEGINNING WITH CANNONBALLS Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness, An Anthology of Modern American Women Poets, edited by Barbara Segnitz and Carol Rainey. Dell Publishing Co., 1973. During my first bumbling attempts at creative writing, I devoured this book. I underlined important sections in the Introduction and marked passages in […]
The spark for A WEEK AT THE SHORE
The spark for A WEEK AT THE SHORE Given that I’ve written more than 80 books, approaching a new one is daunting. There are times when I feel I’ve written every story there is to be written – times when I have to struggle to leave my comfort zone in search of an original idea. […]
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