Tag: featured
I Spent Four Years Married to a Monster – and Then Wrote a Novel About it
Patricia Gordon Stevens is a counsellor who endured domestic violence and stalking before fleeing the family home. She cautions friends to pick up on signs that others missed in her case. By Patricia Gordon Stevens I wrote Madness In Memphis out of necessity. I spent too long married to a man who made me afraid, […]
Speak Up to Breathe Freely
By Kate Woodworth It’s 1988, and I’m in the back seat of the car, my mother at the wheel, one of my sisters beside her. I’ve just been picked up at Boston’s Logan Airport after flying in from Salt Lake City, where I’ve been living for about ten years. We talk this and that until […]
Past is Present: The Inspiration for The Meaning of Fear
By Laura Hulthen Thomas Sometimes a novel is what happens when you just can’t let things go. My inspiration for The Meaning of Fear came from the same impulse the novel’s main characters battle against–a failure to leave the past in the past. A few years back, I published a short story collection about characters […]
The Magical Experience of Writing Romance Novels about Healing
By Patricia Leavy The Celestial Bodies Romances are a love letter to love itself—love in all forms—romance, friendship, country, work, art, and most importantly, learning to love ourselves. Tess Lee and Jack Miller’s love story is the heart of these novels. Tess Lee is a world-famous novelist. Her inspirational books explore people’s innermost struggles and […]
The Land as Character by Victoria Tatum
By Victoria Tatum My mother instilled in all six of her children a love of reading. She recommended books and had shelves of them for us to draw from. After she died I thought of that source of books as gone, but it wasn’t. Since then my brother Tim, my sister Shelley, and I have […]
The Inspiration Behind Recipe for Joy
This book was born from grief…but, also, from deep love. For years, I drove from New York to Cleveland to take care of my mom, going with her to treatments, cooking for her, doing whatever I could to make the battle she was fighting easier. But what my husband, John, did for us in January […]
The Long Game: How Asking for Help Landed Me a Book Deal
By Linda K. Sienkiewicz The real work of a writer doesn’t end with typing The End. When it comes to publishing a novel, it also takes time, tenacity, and the humility to know when you need help. The publication of my second novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, didn’t happen overnight. It was the result […]
Naked Writing: On Truth, Vulnerability, and the Words We Didn’t Know We Had
By Marijke McCandless Nearly a hundred of us had gathered for a three-day retreat hosted by Outwild™, devoted to building outdoor, value-driven lives. On the second afternoon, we sat beneath long wooden shelters at Earth Trek Retreat Center, the South Fork of the American River flowing beside us in Lotus, California. I was leading a […]
Feng Shui of the Soul
By Alexandra Grabbe This morning, I stuck a Free-Stuff sign in our front yard. I was carrying my second load of miscellaneous items out of the house when a car pulled up. “Are you really giving away that beautiful quilt?” the neighbor asked. “I am. It needs a new home. Would you like it?” Hormonal […]
Inspired by Truth
By Sally Dukes I have always been in awe of those novels I read that are fiction at its best. You can delve deeply into a story with complex characters and intriguing narratives. The pages turn effortlessly, before you know it, the clock has struck midnight. How do authors do it, I often wonder. How […]
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