Category: On Writing
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: How Innovative Use of Language Can Serve to Discover New Ways of Communicating Difficult Topics
By Sadie Hoagland In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gabriel García Márquez referenced his work as the literary expression of an “outsized reality… a reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths.” He was referring to, and listed in his speech, the many atrocities, […]
Fulfilling A Special Wish
I grew up in Islington during the 1970s. when most parents would spend their time in the pub, dragging their kids along and sitting them outside with a bottle of coke and a bag of crisps. They would tell you to behave, then they would emerge five hours later and you had to try and […]
The Realism in Romance by Karen King
Romance novels are often dismissed as sheer escapism, derided as emotional pipe dreams, unrealistic fantasy with weak heroines, impossibly handsome heroes in formulaic plots that always end in an unrealistic happy ever after. As an author of eight romantic novels, and a reader of many more, I strongly disagree with this assumption, often made by […]
THE LIFE AND LOVES OF E. NESBIT
Edith Nesbit is considered the inventor of the children’s adventure story and her brilliant children’s books influenced bestselling authors including C.S. Lewis, P. L. Travers, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson, to name but a few. But who was the person behind the best loved classics The Railway Children and Five Children and It? Eleanor Fitzsimons, acclaimed biographer and […]
Irrational Yelling: The Inspiration for Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes
By Kathleen West When I began writing MINOR DRAMAS & OTHER CATASTROPHES, I was in my fifteenth year of classroom teaching, a job I love. In fact, I never deviated in my desire to become a teacher since first having an inkling at age eleven. I idolized my teachers and coaches, desperately wanted to please […]
Introducing Art In Fiction
INTRODUCING ART IN FICTION A New Literary Website Developed by Carol M. Cram Author of a trilogy of historical novels about women in the arts I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Art In Fiction (www.artinfiction.com), a new website for lovers of novels inspired by the arts. I’ve created Art In Fiction as a literary […]
This Parisian Life
Every morning in Paris I walk my dog across the Seine and look up river. On the horizon stands the Notre Dame Cathedral, until recently the spire pointing to the sky. In my mind’s eye she looms larger in the vista than she does in real life but that is surely due to her outsized […]
The Woman In The Dark
I grew up in a small Gloucestershire village – back then, there were only four channels on the telly and as a teenager there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. My nearest library was ten miles away, my nearest bookshop twenty. I was never one of the hanging-round-on street-corner kids, I preferred to […]
The Catharsis of Memoir Writing by Beth Ruggiero York
by Beth Ruggiero York Author of Flying Alone: A Memoir It takes courage to write a memoir. Sort of like going to confession if you are Catholic. If you want absolution, you must admit to all the stupid things you’ve done. Similarly, if you want to sell your story, you must bare your moments of […]
Butchering Eels By Julie E. Justicz
I dreaded the moment for years—through the early drafts and the revisions, through the long slog to complete the novel, through its acceptance by a small press, through several rounds of copy-editing, right up to the printing of advance review copies (ARCs). I worried and I wondered: What will my mother think when she reads […]
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