Tag: women writers
The Weather Here
My own internal and external storms increasingly seem to mirror the weather patterns of climate change. I started noticing this last year, just after turning 60. I closed my law practice, hoping, with my daughter several years out of college, I could turn my attention elsewhere, I could spend time listening to and answering my […]
Writing Without A Plan
I did not come to creative writing with a plan. I had moved between the worlds of books and design in past lives: as a book editor at several publishing houses in New York City and — after years of study at Parson’s School of Design — designing interiors in the New York metro area. […]
A TURING TEST FOR FICTION By Katherine Forbes Riley
When can a man write as a woman? A woman of another culture? A brutally raped woman? When is this acceptable and when does it fail a test society hasn’t explicitly defined, but we still see administered? Moreover, the test itself also changes, for we can all name certain memorable books that passed with flying […]
How I turned two things I loved into a Book
When I first started baking challah, it came out looking like pita. I was pregnant and we’d moved to Colorado Springs. I had to go to the library to look up high altitude baking (this was in the eighties) and while I was there, I picked up an old book on a display shelf. I […]
Yes, My Female Characters Have Sex
Yes, my female characters have sex.* *Good sex. And I no longer care if that bothers some people. By Amy Mason Doan My novel SUMMER HOURS was five months from publication when the “S word” first came up. It was on GoodReads, where an advance reader had put the book on a list: “Character You […]
Nuance vs. Propaganda
Most novels have a message of some kind, even it’s just “sometimes you have to break yourself out of a bad place to get to a better one.” We all want the stories we’re reading or watching to have some meaning. That’s why we started telling them to each other in the first place. But […]
What Inspired Me To Write The Perfect Dress
Auspicious maybe, but a comment I remember from my childhood was: ‘Louisa has very interesting dress sense’. According to my mother, I used to rock-up to primary school wearing jewellery made from tin foil, homemade shoes, and my favourite vest over the top of everything – very ahead of the underwear-as-outerwear trend. I can remember […]
On Being A Writer
I was sixteen years old when my first poem was published in The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper in Memphis. TN. The poem, titled “Souvenir” was about the Vietnam War. The year was 1969 and I was in the eleventh grade. I have been writing ever since. I was blessed to have a high school English […]
Woman, Man, or Both?
Garbo portrayed you in Queen Christina, beautiful, when you, in fact, were not. These days you’re celebrated as an early feminist, although you, of course, would have sneered. And to be fair, some still call you a traitor, even to yourself. Once, at a dinner party in Sweden, my host showed me a fragment of […]
When You Plant A Seed…
When a tiny seed is planted it’s always a miracle to me how it germinates and finds its way into the world. That little shoot that forces its way through the often unyielding earth to reach for the sky. It was a bit like that for me when I attended a ten-week creative writing course […]
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