Tag: featured

How A Tiny Set of Overlooked Words Can Illuminate God by Varina Buntin Willse

How A Tiny Set of Overlooked Words Can Illuminate God by Varina Buntin Willse

Varina Buntin Willse is an award-winning author of spiritual and narrative nonfiction with degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Oxford University. Her latest book, Beneath and Between: And Other Overlooked Words that Illuminate God, gives readers a fresh vocabulary to experience an ineffable God. Varina is the creative force behind […]

September 29, 2026 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Jessica Siskin

Authors Interviewing Characters: Jessica Siskin

Part satire, part emotional character study, LOOKS PERFECT explores identity, performative culture, and what authenticity means in a hyper-visible world offering a timely look at internet fame and the gap between how we’re seen and who we are. Siskin brings a uniquely informed perspective: a former fashion executive and founder of the viral Instagram brand Misterkrisp, she […]

September 29, 2026 | By | Reply More
Writing Into the Shadows: How I Wrote the Hard Stuff by Suzanne Sherman

Writing Into the Shadows: How I Wrote the Hard Stuff by Suzanne Sherman

The first book I wrote in was turquoise, with a tiny metal key to lock and unlock it, a key which, at nine years old, I promptly lost. What I found, however, was a best friend for life. For the next five and a half decades, and to this day, I visit with my best […]

September 29, 2026 | By | Reply More
On Writing My Three Fathers, A Memoir:  A Window That Turned Out To Be a Door 

On Writing My Three Fathers, A Memoir:  A Window That Turned Out To Be a Door 

My Three Fathers, in some ways started as a love letter to my father Juan—the opening section is implicitly addressed to him. And it’s a letter of reckoning: this is what you missed and yet helped create by your absence. But also, here, I have made this for you.  By the time I met my […]

September 29, 2026 | By | Reply More
The Unlearning Project by M.D. Roblyer

The Unlearning Project by M.D. Roblyer

In her memoir-how-to book The Memoir Project, author Marion Roach Smith archly observes that “the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves.” She’s sold a lot of copies being right about that. I joined that white-haired throng after retiring from a long career in higher education and, […]

September 27, 2026 | By | Reply More
How I Found the Seed for The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker from My Own Family Tree  By Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

How I Found the Seed for The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker from My Own Family Tree By Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

My mother passed away in May 2015, six months after the release of my narrative nonfiction book, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels. When I heard that the book had made the New York Times best seller list, my mother was the first person I called, both of screaming incoherently and laughing through tears. She was the reason […]

September 26, 2026 | By | Reply More
Second-Chance Books: the Why, the How, and the How Much of Rights Reversion by Sharon Maas

Second-Chance Books: the Why, the How, and the How Much of Rights Reversion by Sharon Maas

Last month, my six-year-old novel The Violin Maker’s Daughter woke up to new life, with a brand-new cover and brand-new energy. It’s been updated, edited, polished. It’s as if a whole book’s out there: except this time, I didn’t spend hours, weeks, and months writing 100,000 words from scratch. Getting here was a long-winded learning-by-doing […]

September 25, 2026 | By | 1 Reply More
Because I Have Lived It by Joanne E. Betzler

Because I Have Lived It by Joanne E. Betzler

Joanne E. Betzler – author of Nothing to Discuss – Breaking From 20 Years of Intimate Partner Violence I grew up believing that abuse means visible scars and bruises. Broken bones. There was zero physical evidence that my 20-year marriage had swallowed me whole and erased my identity. From my insider perspective, the union was […]

September 25, 2026 | By | Reply More
Was It Worth It? A Journey of Leaving, Losing and Becoming by Maryam Rafiee  

Was It Worth It? A Journey of Leaving, Losing and Becoming by Maryam Rafiee  

As a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a cycling champion, but there was no women’s team at the time. Cycling in public was also forbidden for women. I cycled through the streets of Tehran  wearing loose jogging clothes and a cap, trying to look like a boy so I would not be stopped by the morality […]

September 24, 2026 | By | Reply More
On Writing WHEN NEWS BREAKS by Carol Lin

On Writing WHEN NEWS BREAKS by Carol Lin

Memoir is inherently about relevance, being current, a hot property in the ever-demanding attention economy. Yet, I waited seventeen years to write WHEN NEWS BREAKS. Before you judge me as naïve, please know the pressure to publish immediately after leaving CNN in 2008 made sense to me. I was fresh off the anchor desk and […]

September 24, 2026 | By | Reply More