Category: On Writing
This Too Shall Pass
We read historical fiction for a range of reasons beyond the pleasure of being immersed in another time and place. It gives us the chance to see beyond the names and dates, acts of Parliament and movements of armies to the people who lived through the great moments of history. We are led to imagine […]
Finding Common Ground
Debra Thomas eloquently tells the story of millions of immigrants in her upcoming novel LUZ. She has worked with immigrant communities in Southern California for decades, is an immigrants rights activist, has toured with Amnesty International to the US/Mexico border (speaking to people of both sides of the border, including Border Patrol agents). Finding Common […]
On Writing HERE SHE IS: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America
I wrote Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, a book that uses beauty pageants to show how American femininity has changed over the centuries, because I thought it was a book I was uniquely positioned to author. I’m a sociologist and professor at Brown University, where one of my […]
A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT ART AND WRITING
When I was seventeen my father gave me an autobiography called The Magic of a Line. It’s out of print now and the author Laura Knight, an English Impressionist artist, is relatively unknown in America. The book has sat on my bookshelf for years. I’ve always kept it despite many moves, partly because it was […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Avery Flynn
Avery Flynn interviews Hadley Donovan, the protagonist in her new rom-com, The Wedding Date Disaster, about snipe hunting, evil twins, and surviving family get-togethers. Giggles, slow dances, hot kisses and happy sighs, that’s The Wedding Date Disaster. It’s a romance about embracing yourself (warts and all) even when your life isn’t as picture perfect as […]
Almost
Almost could go either way. A potential—for the negative or positive. The glass is almost full. It’s almost empty. Almost is about just barely, a narrow margin, coming close. A seed that germinates and turns to fruit or flower, or doesn’t. It’s about fate. If you think about the two words all and most, your […]
Scary Clowns are so Passé: On Writing an Evil Mime Artist
Scary Clowns are so Passé: On Writing an Evil Mime Artist By Chrissey Harrison A phobia of clowns is known as coulrophobia. With their exaggerated features, clowns are very “other”, even monstrous – it only takes a small shift in perspective to turn a caricature into a grotesque. They also behave in challenging, transgressive ways, […]
A Confederacy of Authors
L B Gschwandtner A few years back, I read an article on HuffPo titled Sticks & Stones: The Changing Politics of the Self-Publishing by Terri Giuliano. She made the case that a) self publishing or, as it’s now known Indie Pubbing, is growing fast, b) some authors published by traditional houses resent this, c) sales for ebooks are climbing, d) sales of paperback books are […]
On Change Meetings
Caroline won her first National Poetry competition at 10 years old and from that moment dreamed of being a writer. After juggling motherhood with modelling assignments, she founded an Interior Design Company working on many projects in the UK and abroad. Her second marriage to the widowed Conroy Harrowby brought four stepchildren into her life, […]
Writing Miracle Country
The first words that appear in Miracle Country came from an essay I wrote when I was twenty years old. The essay was called “Charade” and I wrote it in a college class taught by the writer Marcia Aldrich, the very first creative nonfiction class I ever took—my introduction to the genre that would become […]
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