Category: How To and Tips
How My Women’s Writing Group Vents Together Instead of Tearing Work to Shreds
When I started writing a novel based on the story of Cupid and Psyche, I fell apart. I completed a hundred pages that covered the Greco-Roman pantheon before realizing I needed to focus only on my one new Internet goddess. I showed my fiasco to a kind, well-intentioned reader who happened to have an obsession […]
Inspiration Behind AMONG THIEVES
Since the deal announcement for my debut novel went out a little over a year ago, I have legitimately lost count of how many times I have been asked what inspired me to write AMONG THIEVES. The super fun thing is that every time someone asks me this question, I suddenly forget every single word […]
LEMONS IN THE GARDEN: NOT FAMOUS ENOUGH
Forty years ago, I had a dream in which Blanche Ames told me to write her autobiography. I’d read about Blanche while I was working on a team to write a massive women’s history reference book, and of course her name caught my attention. Then I learned that Blanche was my grandmother’s aunt. How was […]
On Writing and Early Motherhood
On Writing and Early Motherhood ‘You’ll never have time to read.’ The first time I heard it, it sounded strange, remote from my life. The second, third times, it began to sink in. And there were more. ‘You’ll find it a challenge just to get through the day.’ ‘You’ll develop “mummy brain.”’ If you’ve ever […]
The Sentence
I, who love words so much, am surprised to find myself newly enchanted with the sentence as a unit of language. Sentences in all their delicious variety, some with many clauses, dipping in and out, amplifying a theme before it brings itself, sharply, to a halt. Or long sentences that make you think, having to […]
The Girl in the Red Boots: Making Peace with My Mother
by Judith Ruskay Rabinor, PhD This book was born in 1983, when my 68-year-old divorced mother-in-law announced her remarriage. Ironically, her second wedding coincided with my divorce– from none other than her son! I’d always assumed her life as a divorced woman was lonely and difficult, but she opened up and dissuaded me of that […]
How I found The Seed of my Novel Inside Troves of Historical Research
If we speak the truth fearlessly, we shall add to our number those who will turn the scale to the side of equal and full justice in all things.” – Lucy Stone Lucy Stone was one of the “triumvirate” of the Women’s Suffrage movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. However, she is […]
A Random Encounter Leads to Newsletter Happiness
A year into the pandemic, baby boomers (my age group) became eligible to get the vaccine in Massachusetts. Early on the morning of that first day, I joined hundreds of thousands of others trying to get on the state’s vaccine website. Ordinarily, websites are no problem for me. All day long, I navigate, sign in, […]
From Wonder Unto Wonder: Living A Storied Life
From Wonder Unto Wonder: Living A Storied Life Margaret Wolff Though I am an Art Therapist by training, I am, on a cellular level, a storyteller. It’s not just what I do as a writer; it’s how I move through the world. Everything about my life—about Life itself—is a good story. I began writing stories […]
Juggling Life and Art: One Woman’s Story
For many women writers trying to achieve book publication, there are detours, roadblocks, and dead ends. The release of both my first book, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, in 2019, and my novel The Remnants of Summer this May illustrate the circuitous route some women and their books travel. In early 1993, when I […]
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