Tag: featured
Finding Acceptance and Peace Through the Ceremony of Writing
As a chronically indecisive person, I have a hard time choosing what to order at a restaurant, let alone which restaurant to go to. I get lost in an endless cycle of pros and cons, no matter the decision. So, the really big ones—like whether or not to have a child—can be agonizing. I’d always […]
The Professor of Mean
I went to my first writers conference a very long time ago. It was held over the summer on the University of California Berkeley campus; I believe it was sponsored by the Berkeley English department, but as they say in the movie Airplane, “that’s not important now.” I won’t name the man who was in […]
The Best Books in Life Aren’t Always Free
If you’re like me (and pretty much every other author on the planet), your most fervent desire is to find readers who’ll love your writing and be ready, willing and able to pay for the opportunity to read all those beautiful words you’ve toiled over. But, to paraphrase our dear writer pal, Will Shakespeare, “therein […]
What’s Your Writerly Unique Selling Point?
When I decided to fly to California and train as a bounty hunter it wasn’t part of a marketing strategy but as research for my debut novel – Deep Down Dead. You see, back then I was about 40,000 words into my first draft of a thriller featuring a single mom bounty hunter, and I […]
Where I Find My Inspiration: Thelma Adams
I find a lot of my inspiration for writing novels in the past. For my current book, out November 6th, Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel , part of the inspiration came from a crime that occurred in October 1935. And that crime, the murder of “Pretty Amberg,” the aftermath pictured in the photograph above, somehow involved my […]
Writing and Cultural Appropriation
First things first; I wrote a book based on the life of Sojourner Truth. I’m a white writer. Sojourner was black. It was my first novel and it was published fifteen years ago, back when the discussion of cultural appropriation was simmering, not on a full tilt boil like it is today. I spent five […]
Unmasking Lee Kofman
Once upon a time, I began my writing life the way all writers did in my dinosaur days (the 80s) – as a fiction writer. Or that was what I thought I was. ‘What you’ve written is a diary,’ the publisher of my first book, a novel, informed me, but published it anyway. (It sold […]
The Power of Never Giving Up
Time flies. We all know it. Whether you’re having fun or not. Whether the years are filled with sublime happiness or utter sadness, or, like most of us, with a combination of both. It simply goes, and sometimes, our dreams go with it. We turn around and ten or twenty years have whipped by and […]
Stop Looking to Others to Create a Life of Joy
Originally published on Psych Central I believe there is not enough dialogue out there about soul-sickness, especially among wealthy communities. We are taught to believe from a young age that once we have the perfect partner, house, car, children, and careers, we will be happy. And often times this is not the case; the happiness […]
The Idea of North: Writing and Recovery By Tanya Marquardt
I wrote the first draft of my book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway drunk. Like blind, staggering drunk. In 2010 that’s what I did best. I had gotten into a prestigious MFA Program, moved from Canada to New York after my mother co-signed a loan from the bank, and had two years to spend my […]
Recent Comments