Category: On Writing
Falling in Love with the Enemy
After the end of the Second World War, my aunt married a German whom she had met before the war began. They were deeply in love but, for obvious reasons, the marriage sent shock waves through my family and no doubt through his. It must have taken all their determination and courage to weather the […]
Muse Wyoming
A muse is a spirit or source that inspires artistic creation. Wyoming is my muse, but it didn’t start out that way. When I moved to Rock Springs, I arrived on a prop plane that rose and fell like a roller-coaster on the currents of a gale-force wind. But what felt like a freak storm […]
Mothers & Daughters
I am very close with my mom, and always have been. There have, however, been bumps in the road of our relationship. One of the bumpiest was after my senior year of high school when she sent me, against my will, on a wilderness adventure. I’d been a solid B+ student throughout school, but halfway […]
What Made Me Write About a Boy
By Gail Godwin, author of Grief Cottage: A Novel The boy, the idea of the boy, had been with me a long time, but for years he was just “the boy.” It wasn’t until the early summer of 2014, the week of my seventy-seventh birthday, that I heard him thinking inside my mind. I was on […]
The Truth in the Lie or the Lie in the Truth: A Writer’s Childhood Diaries
In my debut novel, SECRETS OF SOUTHERN GIRLS, the reader gets an up-close and wildly personal look at Reba’s life via her diary. It’s the one place where she can confess the many secrets she is too afraid to share with anyone else. That’s the purpose of a diary, isn’t it? I understand the allure […]
The Importance of Being an Outsider
There are two questions that people always ask me – first why I write about Cornwall (they inquire knowing I’m an American living in Dubai) and second how do you write about Cornwall if you’re not there (they assume it would be easier sitting in my Cornish home rather than in the villa in Dubai […]
WE’RE SISTERS, and that explains everything…
Your sister can be the first person you call with news whether it’s good or bad or…she can be the last. Of course, there are always sisters who fall somewhere in between. But wherever you and your sister end up on the scale of the sister bond, the reasons are often complex and multi-layered. After […]
Women’s Fiction With A Side Of Horror
When my youngest son was five, he loved the History Channel show MonsterQuest. I let him watch it without supervision, assuming it had to be fairly tame. He didn’t seem to be scared by it exactly, just a little…obsessed. At some point, he became aware that there were DVDs of all the episodes, and he […]
The Art of Co-Authorship
When we launched our website SomethingRhymed.com, we set ourselves a yearlong goal to research and write about a different pair of female writer friends every month. Well-wishers cautioned that we might struggle to find a dozen such duos, and this was something that worried us too. We knew all about Wordsworth and, Byron and Shelley, […]
Why Writers Need Social Media
I first joined Facebook in I think, 2007, so ten years ago! I can hardly believe it’s been so long. Twitter was a little later, around 2010. At the time, social media was all very new to me and I couldn’t really see the point of it, but now it has become an essential part […]
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