In a New Interview, Rose Solari Opens up about Publishing and Writing in the era of COVID
"At the beginning of ASP we were told 'You'd be lucky if you made it 3-5 years.'" 10 years and a million trials later, poet and ASP co-founder Rose Solari delivers this extremely honest interview to author Kathy Rampsberger
Author Kathy Rampsberger conducts this incredible digital interview as part of her "Story Hour" series.
It's been months now since the start of the COVID 19 pandemic and much has changed in the landscape of publishing and writing. Always attuned to change and always in conversation with the past, writer and poet Rose Solari discusses the art that matters to now and living through the age of COVID. In this interview you will learn about Rose's writing process, whether she outlines or writes spontaneously, her parents, her ear for music, the work and research that went into her first novel, A Secret Woman, keeping the doors open in the time of a nationwide pandemic, and so much more. This is a candid and emotionally vulnerable interview from one of Maryland's finest women of letters. It is not to be missed.
Blurring the boundaries between past and present, between the body and the spirit, between female and male, A Secret Woman is a sexually-charged adventure through time and space, a profound meditation on the mother-daughter connection, and an enlightening exploration of what it means to make love, to make art, and to make a life worth living.
A Secret Woman is not only a pleasure to read, it is sneaky serious in a way I particularly like. Rose Solari explores the eternal literary theme of self — who we are, who are the ones we love, and how we invent and reinvent these people, trying always to paint ourselves into the vast canvas of life and history. A very promising fiction debut. — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Perfume River and Severance
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.