Category: On Writing
It’s the Right Time for Love at the Border
When I heard that my company was for sale, it was the worst possible news. I was head of Human Resources which meant that we wouldn’t be hiring anyone or initiating any new projects. What was I going to DO for the next year or so that I knew it would take to ready the […]
How My Love of Vintage Inspires my Writing
For as long as I can remember I have been passionate about vintage. As a young girl, this was sometimes more out of necessity because of lack of funds, than a desire to be environmentally mindful, but on other occasions my enthusiasm was the result falling in love with something which had already served a […]
Letters To Ourselves
My mother sits at the kitchen table, her hat and boots still on, her chair dragged at an awkward angle to the corner of the table so that she has to reach to write her letter. We have just returned from a shopping outing, the first time we have gone shopping together in years. She […]
Excerpt of THE SEASON: A History of the Debutante
The world of debutantes opens into a revealing story of women across six centuries, their limited options, and their desires in Kristen Richardson’s THE SEASON: A History of the Debutante [W. W. Norton & Company; November 2019; $26.95 Hardcover]. Digging into the roots of the debutante ritual, with its ballrooms and white dresses, Kristen Richardson – […]
From News Release to Novel
by Susanna Beard When I was about seventeen years old, my father asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said: “I’d like to write novels.” His response was less than encouraging. “It’s really hard to write a novel, you know,” he said. “You’d need to do a considerable amount of research, […]
Headstrong: Surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury
Headstrong: Surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury She didn’t see the hammer. For a fraction of a second JoAnne Jones saw a young black face, framed by a black hoodie, and then she descended into a place where she felt and saw nothing. Jones survived this sudden assault by a stranger, but it left her with […]
Resistance in Nazi Germany and the Power of Inspiration
Inspiration. I spent years looking for inspiration. I often imagined inspiration would find me on a sunny day, under a leafy tree with a book in hand and a butterfly on my knee. Clarity would strike, and like something out of a movie, I’d be inspired to create something beautiful and lasting—something with my hands […]
Why We Need Contemporary War Fiction Written by Women
At some stage during my adult life, and this will astound my history teacher if she’d discover, I found myself fascinated by the thought of writing fiction inspired by contemporary events. A thread that brought me here might have been reading Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” in my teens; another one, witnessing the terrorist […]
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 […]
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