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.
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 […]
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 […]
On Writing ONLY GIRLS BLEED by Elaine Lawless
I took it personally when the Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion in the United States on June 22, 2022. Not because I had ever had or needed an abortion, or thought I might become pregnant again, but because for fifty years, I had, like all women in my country, assumed I was […]
Staying Still By Hannah Adams
As a yoga teacher, I often say to my students, as they arrive in the fifth or sixth downward-facing dog of the class, that they have never done this downward dog before, and they will never do it again. Their task is to be still with it, to experience themselves within the pose, and to […]
It’s a Dog’s Life by Leslie Kain
I hadn’t had a dog in my life since Maddie, the golden retriever that grew up with my kids. But after my husband and I recently said goodbye to our eighteen-year-old cat Sheba (who’d become blind, and sat beside me in my writing chair, often walking on my keyboard), it was time to again welcome […]
My Alternative to an MFA as a Debut Writer by Robin Rosenbluth
When I decided to write a memoir about the transformative year I spent in Northern Kenya, living with the semi-nomadic Samburu and Rendille tribes, I had little experience writing creative nonfiction. After almost 10 years, I completed my first draft of Living with Strangers, which covered my childhood and teenage years in foster care, as […]
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