Category: On Writing
Speak Up to Breathe Freely
By Kate Woodworth It’s 1988, and I’m in the back seat of the car, my mother at the wheel, one of my sisters beside her. I’ve just been picked up at Boston’s Logan Airport after flying in from Salt Lake City, where I’ve been living for about ten years. We talk this and that until […]
Past is Present: The Inspiration for The Meaning of Fear
By Laura Hulthen Thomas Sometimes a novel is what happens when you just can’t let things go. My inspiration for The Meaning of Fear came from the same impulse the novel’s main characters battle against–a failure to leave the past in the past. A few years back, I published a short story collection about characters […]
The Land as Character by Victoria Tatum
By Victoria Tatum My mother instilled in all six of her children a love of reading. She recommended books and had shelves of them for us to draw from. After she died I thought of that source of books as gone, but it wasn’t. Since then my brother Tim, my sister Shelley, and I have […]
The Inspiration Behind Recipe for Joy
This book was born from grief…but, also, from deep love. For years, I drove from New York to Cleveland to take care of my mom, going with her to treatments, cooking for her, doing whatever I could to make the battle she was fighting easier. But what my husband, John, did for us in January […]
Naked Writing: On Truth, Vulnerability, and the Words We Didn’t Know We Had
By Marijke McCandless Nearly a hundred of us had gathered for a three-day retreat hosted by Outwild™, devoted to building outdoor, value-driven lives. On the second afternoon, we sat beneath long wooden shelters at Earth Trek Retreat Center, the South Fork of the American River flowing beside us in Lotus, California. I was leading a […]
Inspired by Truth
By Sally Dukes I have always been in awe of those novels I read that are fiction at its best. You can delve deeply into a story with complex characters and intriguing narratives. The pages turn effortlessly, before you know it, the clock has struck midnight. How do authors do it, I often wonder. How […]
My Writing Journey, by Shanora Williams
by Shanora Williams I first want to start by saying that I often forget to sit and think about my writing journey. I’m so used to doing the next thing, or getting sucked into the next story, that I don’t really take quiet moments to acknowledge my accomplishments. I suppose this is a good place […]
Claiming My Voice
by Lena Fein As a toddler I adored stories, especially fairytales. My father would come into my bedroom just before bedtime and read my sister and me a story from a large, colorful book of classic fairytales. He’d change his voice to portray the different characters. I’d gasp with delight when he squeaked out the […]
Small Press Pages March 2026
March always feels like a month in transition—winter loosening its grip, spring beginning to stir, and the promise of longer days just around the corner. It’s the perfect time to gather a stack of books that reflect that sense of movement: stories that challenge, surprise, comfort, or simply keep us good company as the seasons […]
A Book Written to Offer Hope
By Brigitte Shipman I was destined to be a teacher. From age six, I played school and always took the role of the teacher. Teaching was my calling. Then I became a mother in the Spring of 1992. So, while teaching is what I loved and pursued as a career, being a mom has been […]
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