Tag: featured
Coffee Run Inspiration
Donna Koros Stramella Readers often ask me where the inspiration for my novel, Coffee Killed My Mother originated. Curiously, the title came first and was ultimately the inspiration for the book. On one of my frequent coffee runs a number of years ago, I was headed to a drive-thru for a cup and a car […]
Making Nonfiction Your Own By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
It’s tempting to say that every book is like your first, but the very good news is that it’s not. Having just published my sixth book, I’ve seen your future—if you’re anywhere between books one and five—and I can assure you that it does get easier. It never gets easy, of course. And every one […]
Telling The Story Without Knowing The Answers
On New Year’s Eve, a year after my mother died, my father said, “I want you to tell her story.” In any family this would be an awkward moment, but in ours it was an invitation to dance in a field filled with buried landmines waiting for the foolhardy to set off an explosion. “Not […]
Where Do Ideas Come From? Writing The Silk House
It’s a question that writers are often asked, and before I began writing novels I found it hard to imagine where I might find the inspiration for a short story, let alone something to sustain an entire novel. However, once I began to think in a certain way, actively paying attention and looking out for […]
Writing Uncertainty in Uncertain Times
In the period since WWII and the Cold War, it is doubtful that we have a frame of reference for the uncertainty with which people lived in the past. Until the unprecedented danger and constrictions of COVID-19, our era, in contrast to previous history, has come to expect that life is fairly free of dangers, […]
What Running a Bookshop Taught Me About Writing By Natalie Jenner
By Natalie Jenner Four years ago, I realized my lifelong dream of opening a small bookshop near the shore of Lake Ontario, in an idyllic and vibrant downtown community. For someone who had long ago given up trying to get published, yet still craved a way to make books a bigger part of her daily […]
Footnotes in History
Footnotes in History We traveled through the Bear River Valley in the forenoon . . . (it) is tolerably fertile and looks as if it might be well adapted to raising wheat. During the afternoon our road over the mountains was quite slippery in consequence of light showers which fell at intervals during the day. […]
Five Books by Women Writers I’ve Read More Than Once And Why
By Jill McCroskey Coupe, author of BEGINNING WITH CANNONBALLS Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness, An Anthology of Modern American Women Poets, edited by Barbara Segnitz and Carol Rainey. Dell Publishing Co., 1973. During my first bumbling attempts at creative writing, I devoured this book. I underlined important sections in the Introduction and marked passages in […]
I’ll Rise
In 1970, Joni Mitchell lamented in “Big Yellow Taxi,” “No, no, no/Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…” The song served as a red flag; in an instant, what we hold dear could assume the quality of mist and dissipate. The lyrics are apropos to the pandemic […]
Tips for Writing During Tough Times
These days, it seems as if thinking or speaking about anything else except our COVID-19 pandemic seems frivolous or selfish. I mean, why should any of us bother to create or write anything good when our inner and outer worlds have gone so bad? Self-Sabotaging Our Creative Selves In the face of crisis, many of us suspend […]
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