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 Origin Story: Soul Toll, For Anyone Who Has Ever Wondered if Success is Enough
By Anusia Gillespie At 29, I quit my law firm job with six-figure debt and no backup plan. Something had shifted. A meditation as part of a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program cracked something open in me, like a champagne cork popping, and there was no going back. It was as if I’d glimpsed behind […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Tamar Shapiro
RESTITUTION As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother’s childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. Decades later in 1989, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled […]
HELLO WIFE, by Lisa K. Friedman: Excerpt
HELLO WIFE Single, unfulfilled and well into middle age, long-troubled Charlotte Lansing desperately reaches for love and acceptance. When she announces her engagement to an unemployed morphine addict, her family falls into a tailspin. Her mother is determined to prevent disaster, her father seeks to mend the growing chasm, and her sister stubbornly hopes that […]
Pages of the Past: The Story Behind my Story
Margie Goldsmith, author of “Becoming a Badass: From Fearful to Fierce.” Covid hit. Most of my magazine assignments were experiential travel stories, but with all travel cancelled, now would be the perfect time to write a memoir. Yet, every famous actor, film star and rock star was writing their life story. Who was I? And […]
How My Book of Essays Became a Memoir of My Journey of Self-Discovery on Ireland’s Backroads
by Diane Hartman When I began my memoir, Getting Lost On My Way: Self-Discovery on Ireland’s Backroads, many years ago, I envisioned it as being a book of essays weaved together by a common thread –my four solo trips to Ireland over a period of seven years. I kept a journal during my travels and […]
The Writing of A Map of Her Own by Dede Montgomery
When I began this story, I thought it would be my fifth rather than sixth book. But as other authors know to happen, life interrupted. I did know that Celia, a character from my “novel in stories” Humanity’s Grace, had more in her. And maybe character Paul did too? This felt like my compulsion to […]
The Soundtrack of Storytelling
By Heather Snograss Music has a way of weaving its way through all of our lives like thread. Some may use it as background noise while they are studying, working, or even to fall asleep. I am a person who retains what I read with music in the background and that is one reason I like […]
’How’s Your Book Doing?’ and Other Post-Publication Questions
By Lorraine Devon Wilke Every step in the process of birthing a book has a life of its own: Imagining the book. Writing the book. Editing the book. Querying the book. Not querying the book. Publishing the book. Celebrating the publishing of the book. Then marketing and promoting the book. And marketing and promoting the […]
Some of My Best Writing Teachers Have Been People in Prison
By Joyce Hinnefeld In the spring of 2019, near the end of my twenty-five years of teaching writing at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I decided to try something new. After participating in a Story Exchange training session with Narrative 4—a group that works on “building compassionate classrooms . . . one story at a […]
HOW A FAMILY HEALTH ISSUE INSPIRED AND INFORMED ONE OF MY STORY LINES
I started writing The Summer of Love and Death in January 2022 and submitted it to my publisher in November 2022. In this early draft of my novel, the story did not include Vera Ford, a pivotal character in the earlier books, and the mother of my protagonist, Detective Susan Ford. I couldn’t quite fit […]
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