Author Archive: Women Writers Women Books
Dutch by birth and serial emigrant, Barbara currently lives with her husband and daughter in a tiny village in Galicia, Spain, as basic and simple as can be. W Barbara's website.
The Seeds of a Story by MK Todd
Stories emerge like sunbeams allowing bursts of light to illuminate the unexpected before disappearing unexpectedly to obscure the way forward. In the case of my latest novel, That Was Then, the first sunbeam came from an article I read about identical twins while eating breakfast. What drew me to that particular article? I can’t recall. […]
THE MARRIED WIDOW: EXCERPT
Diane Papalia’s world was turned upside down when she met Bob Zappa, “the man with the chocolate brown eyes,” in 1986. They were immediately drawn to each other. Over the course of 27 years, their stars would cross again and again, but it was complicated for them to be together. It wasn’t until 2013 that […]
Excerpt from The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
We’re delighted to feature this excerpt from The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal story telling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life-and death-tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a […]
Hard to Read/Impossible to Put Down: Thoughts on the Release of A Lucky Breath
This Forgotten Commodity A Lucky Breath is my third memoir. It met the world in December of 2023 after having lived in my notebooks and my computers for over 20 years. When a book exists with you for that long, it becomes a member of the family. Its completion and “departure,” for as much as […]
Revising the Cautionary Tale of My Parents’ Arranged Marriage
My parents’ wedding album was as large as a coffee table and had the heft of Moses’s tablets. As a kid, I loved to sneak into their walk-in closet, pull the album onto my lap, and study it: There was my mother holding her cascading bouquet, my father in white tie and his serious wire-framed […]
Short Fiction: Ditch the Roadmap and Follow Your (Weird) Heart
By Jo Paquette The thing nobody tells you when you are starting out as a writer is that it is a skill you are going to have to re-learn every single time you begin creating something new. Every book, every article, every poem finds its author standing at the bottom of a well, looking up […]
How Superstition Became A Throughline in My Gothic Thriller
When I wrote my latest novel, Do What Godmother Says, a gothic dual-timeline thriller, I faced a major challenge. I knew I wanted the story to take place during two time periods (in the present and in the 1920s). I wanted it to be about two different women: Essie, an aspiring Harlem Renaissance painter, and […]
On Writing ALL I KNOW
When I started writing All I Know, I did not intend to focus on psychology. I set out to write a coming-of-age love story that was complicated and real, and I certainly hope I did that. Yet as a psychotherapist, mental health issues are always on my mind, so they were bound to show up […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Susan Weissbach Friedman
KLARA’S TRUTH It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine, a contained person living a contained life—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, that will dramatically change her life. Her father, she learns—the man who has been absent from her […]
You’re Never Too Old to Be Your Seven-Year-Old Self
By Saki Tanaka One of my favorite things about introducing myself as a picture book author-illustrator is hearing: “I’ve always wanted to write a children’s book!” Nothing delights me more than meeting kindred spirits and fellow storytellers. A common question that follows is: “How long did it take you to make your book?” When I […]
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