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
The World of Yesterday (Armistice Day, 2018)
My father always said that his first memory was of standing on the couch in his parent’s living room, small hands on the back cushion, peering out a picture widow at a neighborhood street in Bend, Oregon. There is a slow-moving line of cars and horse-drawn carriages inching its way down the lane. The line of cars is there every day, and every day he stands there and watches. His street is a long one and at the end of it is the cemetery. He is not allowed to go outside to play. Death is all anyone talks about. Death from a great flu epidemic. Death from a great war just ending. Everyone has lost someone. Most have lost a few. It is 1918…
Linda Watanabe McFerrin Interviewed for Author Matthew Felix’s Video Podcast
Author and poet Linda Watanabe McFerrin sat down with Matthew Felix, himself an author of some renown, for Matthew’s video podcast this last weekend. What follows is an in-depth, thoughtful, and often irreverent look at writing, life, travel, and zombies. And more, we get to hear many of the juicy details on Linda’s new Legacy Book due out from ASP in Autumn 2019…
Fact or Fiction
…And so it is for me, as I send an invented “namesake” into worlds I know vicariously but haven’t lived—Hollywood and hippies, communes and con artists, Woodstock and the Summer of Love. In the opening of Melanie’s Song, J.J. is poised at the edge of the Pacific reflecting on where she has been and where she is going. She is endowed with a deep and spiritual connection to a native place we share, but I am also setting her free to fly into her own undiscovered territory.