The Craft of Writing
Why You Should Consider Multiple Points of View in Your Novel
First published on Women On Writing Writers often struggle with whether to tell a story through the lens of one or many characters. Multiple point of view (POV) can be tricky to master, but there are several reasons it can be very effective. Rather than go with your gut, consider if your intentions align with…
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How To Use Setting To Do More
Recently, I led a mini-lesson in setting for the Book Revision Lab and this essay is one I wrote for their Journal. I love writing setting, but I do so from instinct. In preparing for the lesson, I realized that beyond an awareness that setting is meant to draw the reader into the world of the…
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Announcement: First Place in Fiction at the 2021 Tucson Festival of Books !
The Tucson Festival of Books is astonishing in scope – the free book fair combines hundreds of author booths on the stunning campus of University of Arizona in Tucson, as well as panels, readings, talks. Founded in 2009, the festival is visited typically by more than130,000 book lovers. Fiction Award The festival awards prizes in…
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Researching for A Novel
A challenge for me is squaring the Montauk of my imagination with the “real” place on Long Island. In my novel, for instance, I’ve situated two of my characters in a house on Fort Pond Bay in an area of the coast that doesn’t quite exist. Meanwhile, the two children in my novel, Max and…
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2020 Events
Event highlight this year is the Southampton Writers’ Conference (virtual this year).
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Thomas Hardy’s Literary Dorset
Thomas Hardy’s atmospheric Tess of the D’Obervilles, set in Dorchester near Dorset, made a big impression on me when I read it at a young age, for its depiction of the hard life of agricultural laborers and the restricted possibilities for women. Hardy’s home is now a museum. The modest house and grounds stand in stark contrast…
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A Sense of Place: Virginia Woolf’s “Hauntings”
Virginia Woolf regularly went on what she called “street hauntings,” where she wandered around London. She wanted to feel absorbed in her surroundings, and in particular to watch people’s interactions with the city. She described this as leading to a “dissolution of the self,” a sense that the boundaries between herself and her environment were…
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Music Lover? You’ll Love These Novels
Authors and Books That Have Inspired Me
Eleanor Frances Lattimore: Fair Bay Like a painter using a few delicate brush strokes, Lattimore creates in this children’s book a rich, imagistic world from few words, illustrating the principal that less can truly be more. This is the first book I fell in love with. It made me a reader and instilled in…
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Novels That Ask, What’s At Stake in Starting Over?
One of the themes that I explore in my novel Play for Me is second chances and the disruption we face when searching for our authentic selves. The following novels focus on women who break out of the mold of expectation. They do so to discover their true passion, which could be a second chance…
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