Category: On Writing
The Family Behind the Girl Scouts of America: Lives of the Kinzie-Gordon Clan, 1750s-1950s by Melissa Langley Biegert
My new book is about more than just the two-hundred-year saga of Girl Scout founder Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low’s family. The book also reflects my own thirty-five-year love affair with this subject matter. In some ways this love affair goes back even further, to my days as a Girl Scout, but the writing process began […]
Writer, Imposter by Kristen Tsetsi
I am an imposter. I learned this recently in a conversation on #AuthorThreads. According to a certain way of thinking, or certain people’s way of thinking, I have for some time unknowingly been a writing fraud. The label would be acceptable to me (if a little harsh) had it been assigned with the explanation that […]
Recommended Reads September
In This Life Or Another, Melissa Payne On the brink of death, a man comes to terms with the life he lived versus the one he never pursued in an emotionally rich novel of parallel lives, redemption, and finding purpose. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, mechanic Rusty Wilson takes a bullet to save […]
Beginning a Literary Life at Seventy: What a Lifetime Gives the Writer
I began writing books at seventy. There is a tendency to describe anything begun later in life as a second act, a reinvention, a brave departure from the life that came before. Writing did not feel that way to me. I did not arrive late. I arrived with material. By the time I began to […]
Oral Histories and Gifts of Place by Jean Alicia Elster
There was a cluster of old, gnarled trees across the street from where I stood. And I knew by the look of them that, if they could talk, those trees would be a great source of oral histories. You might think that what I’m about to say is going a bit too far, or at […]
Character Interview: Diane Schaffer
Interview with Noli Cooper, lawyer and investigator, protagonist in Mortal Zin MORTAL ZIN When corporate attorney Noli Cooper visits her godparents’ Santa Cruz Mountain winery, she’s hoping for a few quiet days to consider her future. But the future will have to wait. The body of her childhood mentor, a crusading social justice lawyer and […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Lauren Johnson
The Soufflé Also Rises (The Lizi Cleverly Midlife Badass Detective Series) A laugh-out-loud midlife reinvention caper set in Paris for fans of Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan series and Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age. It’s 2008 and Lizi just can’t catch a break. On the heels of a nasty divorce and a paltry settlement agreement—barely enough to […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Gabriella Saab
In 1912 aboard the RMS Titanic, Nabiha “Bea” Nohra is traveling to America to find work, eager to earn the funds necessary to afford passage for the family she left in Lebanon. On the same ship, heiress Marguerite Ashby sails home to celebrate her engagement to a dull British lord, a marriage that will secure her […]
Florence Nightingale, Hallucinogens and the Apocalypse: How I Wrote Ink Honey Blossom By Liza Losada
Ink Honey Blossom is a novel born of illness and isolation. The world was two months into the COVID lockdown, and I was lying on the floor reading about a ceremonial trading system in Papua New Guinea called the Kula Ring. Sacred beads and seashells are exchanged between islands creating a unique gift economy which […]
On Writing The Braided Prescription by Beth Ricanati, MD
A conversation, a meal, a ritual, an ordinary moment – small acts in and of themselves; and yet powerful enough to alter the trajectory of my life. Small acts that remind again and again that I don’t always know in the moment what will happen, then or later. And this, a reminder therefore repeatedly to […]
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