Before I begin, let’s get something straight: there’s no “typical path to publication.” There’s only what happens to you, when it happens to you. Remember, this is a business where the only effective marketing advice are dollar signs and shrug emojis. That said, my journey is actually fairly typical. I call publishing “the eye of Sauron,” because you’ll find yourself living through long stretches of time where nothing much is…
Lisa Barr is the author of The Unbreakables (HarperCollins) a delicious, sharp novel about a Chicago woman who jets off to France after her “perfect” marriage collapses, putting the broken pieces of herself back together while rediscovering her own joie de vivre—a lust for life, art, and passion. Artful, feminist, and emotionally gripping, The Unbreakables is a remarkable tribute to a woman’s strength in the face of heartbreak and adversity. What’s one book that made…
I can point to many sources of inspiration for my novel, The Talking Drum, but one of the major sources of inspiration was an incident that occurred about 10 years ago at my church, Myrtle Baptist, in West Newton, Massachusetts, during a meeting of the history committee. We were making plans to create a commemorative book on the history of the church in celebration of its 135 years in existence….
Hello friends! I’m so excited to have the opportunity to write throughout my debut year alongside the talented fellow Debs Lisa Braxton, Amy Klein, Kathleen West, and Karen Osborne. Here’s some background on me: I’m a first generation Jamaican American and I was born in the Midwest (Cincinnati, Ohio to be precise). I was a very anxious kid (ahem…and adult) and I learned to create universes in my head with…
I’ve moved around a lot in the past decade, and I’ve had to cull my writing friends from a number of different sources. The first time I joined an actual writing group was when I moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and found one through Meetup that was only a few minutes from my children’s school. In many ways, Just Write changed my life. I had started a…
I’m just going to say this up front: I’ve never balanced work, life, writing, and family. I don’t know how to do that. The only thing I can tell you about in this post is how NOT to do that. I can tell you about my belief that striking such a balance is impossible, and how I’ve always been grateful that I never had to try. I’m…
I write a lot. I devote the majority of every day to writing, reading, and editing. (It really helps to have a work-and-home SigO who is always working.) I know I’m both incredibly lucky to be able to do so and also incredibly boring by most people’s standards. I get antsy when I’m away from my work for too long. Even when I travel—and I travel a lot—I write…
I’m so excited to introduce everyone to Rebecca Fish Ewan, author of By the Forces of Gravity. I met Rebecca last year at Hippocamp, Hippocampus Magazine’s annual Creative Nonfiction conference. She approached me after my breakout session on Experimental Writing and talked about her work, which combined drawings and free verse. It was exactly the type of thing I wanted to add to my presentation, so I was extremely grateful! She even…
On the one hand, it’s easy to discount the need for research in memoir. I mean, who knows your life better than you do? There was actually a good bit of research that went into crafting Girlish. I spoke at length with my siblings, various family members and had many conversations with both my childhood friends and some of my parents’ friends. I read a lot of memoir and poetry…
I held a story in my chest and this story breathed when I breathed, and it flowed through my veins and pulsed with my heartbeat. I couldn’t shut it off. Everything else I tried to write was colored by it. My story needed to be told, so I put it down on pages and it became a book, and then I didn’t have to carry it any longer. As I…
