by: Trish Cantillon “You and your daughter look like sisters!” I said sincerely as I scrolled through my friend Katelyn’s photos. “You look great!” Katelyn, in her early forties, then copped to the fact that she had used the photo app ULike to achieve the youthful look, then insisted I download it. I did. She took a couple selfies of us with baby doll rosy cheeks and soft lighting. She then educated me on all the options for altering the…
by: Rachel Cline I recently spent a weekend in the country with three other writers. We are each at different points in our careers, but all of us are undeniably serious and competitive. Writing that sentence, I wonder if any two writers in the history of time have ever been at the same point in their careers–do you think? Of course we are told and told and told, and indeed we know (in that ignorant way we know everything, oh…
by: Dena Moes If I dug a hole straight through the middle of the Earth from my home in Chico, California, I would eventually surface in India. I took the long way around, traveling for twenty-three hours by air, to see my sister and her brand new baby. My sister Amy was a foreign correspondent posted in New Delhi for years, and I had never made the trip, too busy and cash-poor raising my own young children in California. But…
by: Greer Macallister Historically, women have had to hide their true selves for many reasons. In fiction this can lead to some really intriguing stories, full of tension. As the readers, we know the woman’s true identity, but we relish seeing her forging her way under a different persona, at risk of grave danger if she ever lets the façade slip. In my new novel Woman 99, set in 1888, pampered San Francisco socialite Charlotte goes undercover in an insane…
Aldous Huxley once said, “The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” Both Randon Billings Noble and Amy Long have crafted essay collections that cover subjects as diverse as chronic pain, opioid use and addiction to depression and the longing that memories can elicit. Randon’s full-length collection, Be With Me Always, is available as of March 1, 2019. Amy’s debut essay collection, Codependence, will be released in September 2019. Check out their lively, vulnerable and…