Tag: women writers
Under Grandma’s Table
UNDER GRANDMA’S TABLE It was summertime 1926—a hot steamy night in western Kansas. Peering out from under the table, she looked around her grandmother’s kitchen. Seeing only the bottom half of things—the pie cupboard with the tiny bird-designs tapped into the tin front, the squat legs of the cast-iron stove, the open back door sending […]
Exactly Like Other Girls
By Felicia Grossman One of the fiction tropes that annoys me the most is the “not-like-other-girls” female lead. She appears across genres and often eschews anything coded “feminine” like clothes and make-up and dating. She’s not popular, but she prevails. Main characters like that and their real-life counterparts are wonderful and fun, but what makes […]
Camping: A Writer’s Strategy for Staying Observant
I am just back from a weekend camping trip to the Oregon dunes with my partner Paul, also a writer. We didn’t plan to write on this trip; we simply wanted some time away in nature, sleeping in a tent. This was car camping, driving with a packed car to a Forest Service site not […]
Second Book Syndrome
I feel as if I’ve always known the phrase ‘that difficult second album’ forever: it lives in my vernacular. Mostly due to the fact that I’m married to a man who has spent his career in the music industry and knows all about troubled artists trying to create a second body of work. Not sure […]
Pantry Skills- What Baking Has In Common With Writing
Years ago, in my heady youth, I reconnected with a guy I’d worked with on the student newspaper. We went away for a weekend. In those pre-airbnb days, it must have been a rented house, or maybe a borrowed one, but in any case, it had minimal facilities. When we arrived, after dark, miles from […]
The Importance of Setting in my Books
One of the questions we writers get asked most frequently is where we get our ideas from. I would say that the theme that links all of my books is the desire to create a sense of time and place. I had always been a mystery reader, enjoying the books of the ladies of the […]
Finding Balance
I’ve studied ballet since I was five. Even with taking a decade hiatus during college and just after, it’s still a lot of years. In my mid-forties, at least once a week I practice my pliés and pirouettes. My passé and my relevés. Yet I am known to fall over while putting on my sock […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Lauren Gershell
Lauren Gershell interviews Tatum Ferris, a spin teacher new to New York City and a character in her novel, THAT’S WHAT FRENEMIES ARE FOR. LG: Thank you for being here and agreeing to talk to me. TF: Oh, I am so so excited and grateful to be here. This is so cool and fun! Honestly, […]
What If I Can’t Write Anymore?
While shepherding a new book through a launch, I experience what can only be described as separation anxiety from writing, but then, when it’s time to get back to it, the all too familiar crash of confidence and nagging question re-emerges. What if I can’t write anymore? I’m told this fear is not uncommon with […]
The Unlikely Gift Of Breast Cancer
Four years ago, I was preparing to turn 50, anxious but confidently optimistic I would turn the page to life’s next chapter and finally slow down. Relax. Stop whining and gradually embrace middle age. Then, I abruptly got “the call.” My primary care doctor’s nurse told me I had late Stage III breast cancer. For […]
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