Category: On Writing
Navigating the Spikes by Elizabeth Blackley
You know that feeling when a date in the calendar marks the culmination of a life goal, and after all the hard work, it finally arrives? And as it does, a sledgehammer lands? On the 11th of May, I woke with a low hum of excitement as it was Launch Day for my book, ROW […]
Hannah Sward (Strip: A Memoir) interviews Courtney Kocak on her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild
GIRL GONE WILD is a collection of exploits and delusions about chasing your dreams with reckless abandon and what happens when their pursuit becomes a new kind of trap. In this memoir-in-essays, Kocak takes readers along on her heady metamorphosis from girl to woman and from dreamer to professional artist, as she is transformed in […]
Channeling Marilyn: Why This Story is So Important to Me by Mima Tipper
A few years ago, I sat with my then young daughter looking through a fashion magazine—I think it was Teen Vogue—and noticed yet another ad paying homage to Marilyn Monroe. That got me thinking about Marilyn’s on-going fame, and a question whispered at me: What would Marilyn’s spirit think of this ad? This wasn’t a […]
A Memoir’s Journey: One Writer’s Process by Margaret Whitford
In the aftermath of my mother’s death, I wrote in response to my complicated grief, not only for my mother but also for the maternal relationship I’d hoped for but did not have. Within the blank pages of my journal, I tried to fathom why we were not together during her final days. My need […]
My Writing Journey by Ellen Baker
I loved the feel of a pen gliding on paper as a kid. My mom, an English teacher, would bring me red and blue Papermate ballpoints from work. I was so driven to write that, at seven, after falling off my bike and breaking my right wrist, I scrawled out a messy story about it […]
Atonement and Guilt: How Aristocratic Women in 18th-Century Britain Dealt with Moral Transgressions by Vanda Vadas
In my newly released Scottish Historical romance, The Scoundrel Scot, the heroine, Lady Helene Beckett, is morally burdened with guilt and forced to commit one sin in order to atone for another. Her younger sister suffers from a condition we would recognise today as epilepsy, an illness poorly understood and heavily stigmatised in the 18th […]
A Fork in the Road by Liz Flaherty
I’ve kind of enjoyed the inevitable forks in life’s roads. Not that I’ve always taken the right one, you understand. Heaven knows there were a few boyfriends and lots of outfits and hair colors I should have taken a pass on. I sometimes paid the wrong bill in the days of robbing Peter to pay […]
June Recommended Reads
THE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET, Jennifer Sklias-Gahan In The House in the Middle of the Street, Jennifer Sklias-Gahan conjures a haunting modern fairy tale of inheritance, secrets, and the creatures we invite into our lives. When Rebecca and her husband inherit a stately old home, they imagine it as the perfect place to […]
Understanding the Black Middle-Class—from Childhood Seeds to Sustained Sociological Inquiry By Angela Simms
I grew up in a middle-class Black family in the 1980s and 90s. My dad, Everitt, and my mom, Joan, raised me and my brother, Joshua, in Prince William County, Virginia, a suburb in the DMV, as we locals say (the DC, Maryland, and Virginia Metropolitan Area). As such, my sociological intuition regarding race and […]
From Coffee to Debut Novel: I Have So Many Questions by Denise Smith Cline
Almost every family has an odd story or tradition. We may not know how surprising it is until an outsider hears about it. My aunt did a handstand against the dining room wall in her best Sunday dress after every Thanksgiving dinner, after which her husband played “White Christmas” on the piano. Nothing about this […]
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