Category: On Writing
In Conversation With Ellen Langer, Mother Of Mindfulness
I came across Ellen Langer’s research online, in a NY Times article What if Age Was Nothing But A Mind Set? My first reaction to the headline was skeptisicm. But, as I often do when something makes me feel uncomfortable, I decided to read. The article described her landmark 1979 “counterclockwise” study in which elderly men lived for a […]
Why I Write: Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli
The earliest I can remember wanting to write was when I was around twelve. I had thoroughly enjoyed many of the books in Enid Blyton’s “Adventure” series featuring two sets of siblings: Phillip and Dinah, and Jack and Lucy-Ann, and Jack’s parrot Kiki. I had lived vicariously through them by reading The Island of Adventure, […]
What A Hazard A Letter Is: The Strange Destiny Of The Unsent Letter
I’ve always been fascinated by letters. Listening to Sylvia Plath’s being read on Radio 4 reminds me just how powerful they are, how swiftly they take us back into former lives – our own and other people’s. And for biographers, letters are like buried treasure. The American author and journalist Janet Malcolm describes them as […]
Class And Writing
Street Cat Blues is my debut novel and it was a long time coming. I guess it could be categorised as cosy crime but with a definite noir bite. I am the child of what I sometimes think of as a mixed marriage. By this I don’t mean mixed in terms of ethnic or religious […]
Her Mother’s Daughter: Writing and Inspiration
My book is not an easy read. I know that, because it was not an easy write. It is not a true story, but there are elements that were inspired by my childhood, and many of them I wasn’t even aware of at the time I was writing. Rather than having inspiration for this novel, […]
Looking from The Ground Up
Susan Cheever, daughter of the famous author, John Cheever, once said that fiction is not a competitive sport. Also a writer, living in the shadow of her father’s reputation and achievements can’t have been easy. I believe she made the remark to someone asking what she had published and where, and then saw him compare […]
The Power Of Never Giving Up
Time flies. We all know it. Whether you’re having fun or not. Whether the years are filled with sublime happiness or utter sadness, or, like most of us, with a combination of both. It simply goes, and sometimes, our dreams go with it. We turn around and ten or twenty years have whipped by and […]
Once an Immigrant, Always an immigrant!
Clasping a big folder with every document that could prove our existence, my parents and I stood at San Francisco airport waiting for our turn. The words, “Welcome to the United States of America,” dazzled above the immigration officer. It seemed like hours had passed since we got off our flight from India. The lines […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Patricia Harman
Patricia Harman spent over thirty years caring for women as a midwife, first as a lay-midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on communal farms in West Virginia, and later as a nurse-midwife in teaching hospitals and in a community hospital birthing center. Though she loved caring for women and infants, she recently retired to write […]
When My Cat Died and Came Back to Life, I Did What Any Writer Would Do
Recently, Senator Tammy Duckworth mentioned her “Alive Day” anniversary on Twitter. She said, “Today is my Alive Day, the anniversary of the day I almost died but didn’t.” She went on to describe how 14 years earlier, an RPG hit the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq. She lost both of her legs. But instead of […]
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