Category: On Writing
Priming the Writing Pump: Dolls as My Muse
On days the words didn’t flow, I made dolls. It wasn’t an escape; it was my method of priming the pump to access messages that were trying to come through. It was a way to step easily into creative flow, an act of physically manifesting my muse. I had devoted seven years to a rich […]
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter: Excerpt
FAMILY IN SIX TONES is a dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter–exploring their complicated relationship and touching on war and past tragedy, culture clash and bullying, and growing up both as individuals and as a family. We are delighted to feature this excerpt. From FAMILY IN SIX […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Daniella Bernett Interviews Emmeline Kirby and Gregory Longdon
OLD SINS NEVER DIE Never look back…Treason is deadly While in the Lake District, journalist Emmeline Kirby and jewel thief/insurance investigator Gregory Longdon overhear a man attempting to hire international assassin Hugh Carstairs, a MI5 agent who went rogue. They race back to London to warn Philip Acheson of the Foreign Office and Superintendent Oliver […]
Excerpt of THE SMALLEST OBJECTIVE
The subject of memory is foremost in The Smallest Objective, a memoir of loss and retrieval set during the years when the author’s mother is afflicted with dementia. For World Alzheimer’s Month—September—Sharon Kirsch offers this abridged excerpt from her memoir. In the section below, the author becomes mesmerized by her aunt’s wedding—a subject that remained […]
EXCERPT OF AN AMBIGUOUS GRIEF
Dominique Hunter experienced one of the greatest tragedies most mothers can imagine: the death of a child. Her son Dylan died as a young man, having suffered for many years with debilitating anxiety, OCD, and ADD. In An Ambiguous Grief, she reckons with her loss by engaging in conversation with Dylan and employing the most flexible tool in […]
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter is a multigenerational memoir co-written by acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist, lawyer and professor Lan Cao and her daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao. After more than forty years in the United States, Lan still feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, one which she came […]
The First Rung On The Author Ladder By Penny Batchelor
At a women’s writing conference I went to in 2019 the most memorable advice that stuck with me is that getting published doesn’t mean you’ve reached the top of the ladder – you’re only on the first rung. For a writer who had only just received the holy grail of publishing deal at first this […]
Historical Fiction and Accuracy
I cannot remember a time in my life that I was not in love with history. From sitting at my aunts’feet as a young child and listening to their stories, to enjoying learning new things about history in my classes in school. I can remember in a literature class learning about corduroy roads in the […]
Inspiration For The Best Part Of Us
My first memory of reading amazing works of fiction was in junior year of high school. Mrs. Barnes started the semester with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, moved on to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and ended with A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Yikes. I’m sure I […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Iris Mitlin Lav
A Wife in Bangkok by Iris Miltin Lav (September 8, She Writes Press) is a beautiful tale of one woman who dropped everything for a journey across the globe. It’s 1975, and Crystal is doing her best to be a “good wife” for her family. However, when her husband’s job relocates her family to Thailand, she finds betrayal and isolation among the beauty. Fighting intense loneliness and buffeted by a series frightening and shocking […]
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