Tag: women writers
We Are Not Labels
Once upon a time, I was a bad-ass lawyer. Clients from all over the world came to me to buy and sell companies in the Netherlands. I could swing my big dick with the best of them. Often, I was the only woman in the room and an Asian American at that. If that was […]
A Very Good Place to Start
People always like me to start from the beginning – the good old ‘once upon a time’ approach. ‘Tell us,’ they say. ‘How did you first get into writing?’ The truth is, I was sixteen years old and I had to do a school project. So off I went to Grafton Street, bought a book […]
Recommended Reading: Not Your Mammy’s Books
Despite so much that’s terrible these days it’s a wonderful time to be a writer and a reader. Amidst growing attacks on the truth, and the maniacal scapegoating of fake news, there’s burgeoning honesty, bravery, inclusion, and revolution in fiction, and in particular Irish women’s fiction. Irish literature—once dominated by men, suppressive norms, and scenes […]
Why I Switched From YA to Middle-Grade Fiction
Let the record show that I didn’t start out writing middle-grade fiction. I started in young adult, and had three books published in that category before trying my hand at a younger age group. So, why did I switch? What was the draw for me to suddenly drop the angst and excitement and budding romances […]
An American Road Trip ‘Playlist’ of Books, by Helen McClory
When I started writing Flesh of the Peach I was struggling to live and write in New York. One summer, I decided to take a research trip by bus to where Sarah Browne, the novel’s immigrant protagonist, settles herself against her own failures: New Mexico. The journey took over 2,000 hungry, dirty, beautiful miles in […]
The Creative Unconscious
There’s a lot to be said for writing to a plan or outline. Words emerge much faster if we know where our characters are going and what they’ll encounter along the way. But there’s a downside to approaching our work with an overly rational mindset. Too much order and we lose the capacity to amaze […]
Ancestors As Inspiration
My family history gave me the courage I needed to start my career as a novelist. I can remember a decade ago writing down in Julia Cameron’s The Writer’s Way that I really wanted to write a novel and learn French, but in the years before Amazon I had no idea how to make that […]
If You’re Anxious And You Know It
Being a writer is nerve-wracking for everybody. Self-doubt, uncertainty, writer’s block, nerves–it all kind of comes with the territory. Right? Well, while everyone feels these things sometimes, or to some degree, a lucky group of us feels it all the time. That’s the difference between what I call lower-case anxiety (as in a commonplace feeling […]
Moving from Fact to Fiction
Working as a journalist is more than a job: if you do it long enough, it becomes a state of mind. True to the cliché, you suspect everyone does have a story to tell. And with each story you hear, real life appears more outlandish than the most melodramatic plot. Most of all, when you […]
Who Influences You?
When I think about the authors who have influenced me, I have to go back in time—to my early teens—when I started reading gothic novels from authors like Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë. I loved the idea of a heroine coming to the house of a family she didn’t know and finding out all […]
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