Category: On Writing
Why I Wrote Jack and Lulu Go to the Tree Farm
By Julie Ryan McGue Doesn’t everyone have a favorite tree? Maybe it’s the maple that shaded your childhood home, the pine you decorated every December, or the oak that stood watch over a backyard fort. Trees root us in place and time, and their steady presence often becomes part of our family stories. When I […]
On Writing High Hopes: A Memoir
by Anne Abel At the age of 60, after having one desk too many thrown at me, I quit my community college teaching job, and then I panicked. I suffer with severe recurrent depression. I was terrified that without the structure and focus of the classroom I would fall into the abyss of depression. Then I remembered […]
Always and Forever by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal: Excerpt
“An elegant, slow-burning portrait of quiet heartbreak and enduring love.” –Kirkus Reviews Summary: Three decades ago, a tragedy ignited a chain of events that devastated two New York City families and still haunts them today. Even their youngest members, Suzanne Starek and Jay Darnell, haven’t been left unscathed. Suzanne is at the end of her […]
How Writing one Letter Turned into a Book
By Carol Van Den Hende Dear Women Writers, If you could pen a letter to anyone, living or dead, real or imaginary, who would you write to? Would you write about something left unsaid? That question sparked my fourth book, my collection of personal letters and true stories called Dear Orchid. Funny enough, my earliest […]
Dear Bobby: On Writing Love letters to my Late Husband
Dear Bobby: On writing love letters to my late husband by Diana Papalia Zappa On December 8, 2018, my beloved husband Bob Zappa passed away from hereditary amyloidosis. We had met in 1986 and although there was an instant and intense connection, we weren’t able to be together until 2013. We married in 2015. He […]
On Writing The Ripple Eclipse: Turning the Tide of Inherited Trauma
By Audrey Hyams Romoff Living a turbulent life and writing about it are two very different things. It means revealing family secrets and piercing the veil of a seemingly idyllic life. Yet, that’s what I decided to do, I ignored the warnings from seasoned writers about the psychological fallout of diving into the trauma, and […]
Ending one Successful Series to Create Another
By Jeannée Sacken In my first series, photojournalist Annie Hawkins was frequently on assignment in Afghanistan and finding ways to keep the passion burning with her lover Finn Cerelli. After finishing three books, the characters were living in my head. They’d talk endlessly to me, with Cerelli often choosing to sit on the bench in […]
Breathing New Life into My Book Publishing Journey
By Karin K. Jensen A Timely Chance to Humanize the Immigrant Experience Throughout my childhood, my mother told stories of growing up in her father’s Detroit laundry business during the infancy of the auto industry, and later in a Cantonese village on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. She also spoke of what it was […]
Hunting for Words by Deborah Lee Luskin
By Deborah Lee Luskin Walking into the woods in the dark before dawn carrying a rifle was the hardest thing I’d done since I turned sixty. Writing about it was harder. I became a deer hunter because I wanted to be able to find my way through the northern forest without following a marked trail. […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Susan Coventry
TILL TAUGHT BY PAIN Inspired by the groundbreaking discoveries of ether and chloroform anesthesia, William Stewart Halsted pursues a surgical career with relentless ambition, daring to perform operations deemed impossible by his peers. His reputation skyrockets with each bold success— until his quest for an effective local anesthetic leads him to inject himself with cocaine. […]
Recent Comments