Category: Contemporary Women Writers
10 Reasons To Be Less Productive During A Pandemic
1. You fear dying. Especially if you’re as much of a hypochondriac as I am. When I woke up with a headache, sore throat, and the dreaded DRY COUGH a couple of weeks ago, I feared the worst. I spent the next two days drinking lots of fluids, taking my (resolutely normal) temperature, and checking […]
A Debut Author’s Story: How Science Facts Inspired a Thriller by Eve Smith
Eve Smith’s debut novel, The Waiting Rooms, is set twenty years after an antibiotic crisis. A nurse hunts for her elderly birth mother, in a world where no one over seventy gets access to new drugs. I had the idea for my speculative thriller, The Waiting Rooms, after reading some frightening facts about antibiotic resistance. […]
What’s at Stake in Your Novel?
By Jill Caugherty What keeps readers riveted to a favorite novel, compulsively turning the pages? Sure, fast-paced action with car chases, gun fights, drug deals gone awry, and racy sex scenes might help, but many writers of character-driven fiction don’t rely on these techniques to ratchet up the tension. Instead, we often create conflict, and […]
Why, As A Woman, I Write About Famous Men
“Why do you write from the perspective of artists, instead of women, perhaps from the viewpoint of a maid?” The man who asked this question was a professor emeritus of art history at a top-tier university, which I won’t name here. (Note that he didn’t qualify the word artist with “male.” Apparently, that qualifier is […]
Practicing Inspiration
Can you really practice inspiration? We writers all want it, we all seek it, but mostly it seems to arrive on its own schedule, out of nowhere—a tiny light in the distance, or a sudden burst of joy, the sigh of relief and ahh, now I see! Here’s the right word, the missing image, the […]
Interview With Barbara Probst
Barbara Probst’s novel QUEEN OF THE OWLS (April 2020) is the powerful story of a woman’s search for wholeness, framed around the art and life of iconic painter Georgia O’Keeffe. QUEEN OF THE OWLS has been selected as one of the 20 most anticipated books of 2020 by Working Mother and will be the May […]
When Did You Learn To Read?
When did you learn to read? It’s a question a lot of people get asked. For some, it was before they started formal schooling, often at their mother’s knee. Others learned later. Perhaps it was more of a struggle due to dyslexia or Irlens syndrome or visual problems. For many of us, reading is one […]
My obsession with Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge
She built a monument, then was lost in its shadow. My obsession with Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge I grew up in northern New Jersey, and New York City was like Oz to us. Not being able to afford the fancy restaurants and shows, we did the free stuff. My father loved to […]
Living and Writing and Faith: Dispatch from Self-Isolation, Day 30
All I want to do is have coffee with my parents under a shade tree. It’s day 30 of self-isolating in the era of Covid-19. I’m sixty-five and immunosuppressed (a double-organ transplant patient) so I started drawing back during my spring break from N.C. State. The first week, I went out for groceries and once […]
CHARIS IN THE WORLD OF WONDERS: Excerpt
“When I swung over that windowsill, everything changed for me. We are meant to go in and out of doors in civilized style, but my mother bade me climb into woodsy wildness and a darkness flushed with crimson light and torches …” And so begins the long journey through the wilderness as Charis is forced […]
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