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 Unlearning Project by M.D. Roblyer
In her memoir-how-to book The Memoir Project, author Marion Roach Smith archly observes that “the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves.” She’s sold a lot of copies being right about that. I joined that white-haired throng after retiring from a long career in higher education and, […]
How I Found the Seed for The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker from My Own Family Tree By Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
My mother passed away in May 2015, six months after the release of my narrative nonfiction book, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels. When I heard that the book had made the New York Times best seller list, my mother was the first person I called, both of screaming incoherently and laughing through tears. She was the reason […]
Second-Chance Books: the Why, the How, and the How Much of Rights Reversion by Sharon Maas
Last month, my six-year-old novel The Violin Maker’s Daughter woke up to new life, with a brand-new cover and brand-new energy. It’s been updated, edited, polished. It’s as if a whole book’s out there: except this time, I didn’t spend hours, weeks, and months writing 100,000 words from scratch. Getting here was a long-winded learning-by-doing […]
Because I Have Lived It by Joanne E. Betzler
Joanne E. Betzler – author of Nothing to Discuss – Breaking From 20 Years of Intimate Partner Violence I grew up believing that abuse means visible scars and bruises. Broken bones. There was zero physical evidence that my 20-year marriage had swallowed me whole and erased my identity. From my insider perspective, the union was […]
About a Boy By Tara Badstubner
Ask me how I came to write of loss and grief. Ask me at night when I’m especially tired, when my guard is down, when my heart is heavy from the slow grind of the day. I will tell you a story, maybe, about a boy, a friend, who was goofy and kind. His gait […]
How to Write Fiction That’s True by Jann Alexander
If Virginia Woolfe was right when she wrote, “the truer the facts the better the fiction” in her classic A Room of One’s Own, there’s no better inspiration for writing a story than a true one. Find an old news clipping from 1892 or a web article published yesterday—you can’t invent anything stranger than the truth. Fiction that […]
Was It Worth It? A Journey of Leaving, Losing and Becoming by Maryam Rafiee
As a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a cycling champion, but there was no women’s team at the time. Cycling in public was also forbidden for women. I cycled through the streets of Tehran wearing loose jogging clothes and a cap, trying to look like a boy so I would not be stopped by the morality […]
On Writing WHEN NEWS BREAKS by Carol Lin
Memoir is inherently about relevance, being current, a hot property in the ever-demanding attention economy. Yet, I waited seventeen years to write WHEN NEWS BREAKS. Before you judge me as naïve, please know the pressure to publish immediately after leaving CNN in 2008 made sense to me. I was fresh off the anchor desk and […]
I’m a Story Scavenger…Are You? by Barbara Josselsohn
Three summers ago, while vacationing in Sonoma, California, my family and I went to Jack London State Historic Park. We were looking to do some good hiking, and we’d been told they had some great trails. We first entered the visitor center to get a map and our bearings. I almost didn’t make it back […]
How I Became a Serial Memoirist by Lisa Cheek
I didn’t know much about memoirs when I decided to write one. But what I did know – I was a serial storyteller. Being a film editor for twenty-five years, I told hundreds of stories through film. Most were only thirty seconds while some were full ninety minute features. Many of them comedies, my favorite […]
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