Joel Fried

I hated being caged up, our cramped apartment, too much family, too little space. I escaped to the library, reading everything that wasn’t history or biography. Reading led to writing. I started with short Sci-fi stories. I wrote in spite of F/A grades: F for grammar & spelling, A for content/originality. I wrote in the […]

Lee M. Phillips

Growing up, I was always the shy girl daydreaming in the back of the classroom. I was more content to live inside my own head rather than let others in. My mother had no idea what she’d created when she first told me, ‘You should write these things down!’ I’ve wanted to be a writer […]

Kathleen Elle

My music writing career began in my sophomore year of high school when I traded extracurricular sports for music and took a weekly one-hour class taught by Dr. Kenneth Lampl, who through skill, constant encouragement and patience, awakened in me a talent for writing music I had no idea I possessed. Having always admired great […]

Edie Melson

A lot of people ask me why I started writing, or when I started writing. Truthfully, I’ve been making up stories and writing them down ever since I could hold a crayon and reach a wall. I’m just wired to process life through the written word. But there was a time when I made a […]

Michele Hanson

I started writing to stop myself from going mad. I wasn’t happy at the time. I was thirty, single, a teacher, and my hot water heater kept breaking down. Every Wednesday, my day off, I stayed in waiting for the heater repairmen to come. Every Wednesday they did not come. I stayed at home, crying […]

THE DAILY BEAST Features “Why Should Novelists Be Politically Correct?”

“The recent flap over a romance novel titled For Such a Time whose plot features a concentration camp inmate falling in love with her Nazi captor has aroused the wrath of various critics and readers on grounds that it is too discomfiting and disturbing to have been published. While I can understand why some readers […]

Why Should Novelists Be Politically Correct?

The recent flap over a romance novel titled For Such a Time whose plot features a concentration camp inmate falling in love with her Nazi captor has aroused the wrath of various critics and readers on grounds that it is too discomfiting and disturbing to have been published. While I can understand why some readers […]