Category: On Writing
The String Games, Working In Education and The People’s Book Prize
Ten years ago, I realised I was investing too much time and energy into my career and I was missing a creative outlet. Working in education, I found job satisfaction in watching students progress in their learning but as a teacher I was standing still. So what did I do? I started writing a novel. […]
A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books)
My father was sold by his mother to his aunt for £500. This shocking truth, which came to form the backbone of A Perfect Explanation, was something I’d known all my life. I don’t remember learning it – so casually was it known in the family that its existence was not something of drama. It […]
The Weather Here
My own internal and external storms increasingly seem to mirror the weather patterns of climate change. I started noticing this last year, just after turning 60. I closed my law practice, hoping, with my daughter several years out of college, I could turn my attention elsewhere, I could spend time listening to and answering my […]
Writing Without A Plan
I did not come to creative writing with a plan. I had moved between the worlds of books and design in past lives: as a book editor at several publishing houses in New York City and — after years of study at Parson’s School of Design — designing interiors in the New York metro area. […]
How I turned two things I loved into a Book
When I first started baking challah, it came out looking like pita. I was pregnant and we’d moved to Colorado Springs. I had to go to the library to look up high altitude baking (this was in the eighties) and while I was there, I picked up an old book on a display shelf. I […]
Nuance vs. Propaganda
Most novels have a message of some kind, even it’s just “sometimes you have to break yourself out of a bad place to get to a better one.” We all want the stories we’re reading or watching to have some meaning. That’s why we started telling them to each other in the first place. But […]
What Inspired Me To Write The Perfect Dress
Auspicious maybe, but a comment I remember from my childhood was: ‘Louisa has very interesting dress sense’. According to my mother, I used to rock-up to primary school wearing jewellery made from tin foil, homemade shoes, and my favourite vest over the top of everything – very ahead of the underwear-as-outerwear trend. I can remember […]
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: Researching and Writing The Prisoner in the Castle
By Susan Elia MacNeal At the end of The Paris Spy, the seventh novel in the New York Times-bestselling and Edgar-nominated Maggie Hope series, our plucky heroine finds herself in a predicament—she’s a British secret agent who knows too much about D-Day. What happened in real life, I wondered, to the spies who knew too […]
On Being A Writer
I was sixteen years old when my first poem was published in The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper in Memphis. TN. The poem, titled “Souvenir” was about the Vietnam War. The year was 1969 and I was in the eleventh grade. I have been writing ever since. I was blessed to have a high school English […]
Woman, Man, or Both?
Garbo portrayed you in Queen Christina, beautiful, when you, in fact, were not. These days you’re celebrated as an early feminist, although you, of course, would have sneered. And to be fair, some still call you a traitor, even to yourself. Once, at a dinner party in Sweden, my host showed me a fragment of […]
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