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Poetry Can Save Your Life By Richard Peabody I started out as a fiction writer, a storyteller, a mimic. A derivative time travel piece for our middle school literary magazine was rejected and it took me eons to get back in the saddle. By freshman year of college, a quasi-Hemingway hunting story was brewing. By junior year, I was writing song lyrics to go with my bad guitar-hack noise. A poet friend told me my lyrics sucked but might possibly turn into some decent poems. Poems? What the hell? But everybody seemed to hate my mostly autobiographical stories (particularly my girlfriends) so I … [Read more...]

The Real Author By Grace Cavalieri There’s a real author and an implied author behind every book. The real author of Other Voices, Other Lives is just me, in Annapolis, with my cat, sitting in p.j.s watching trash TV. The implied author is a feminist, creator of women’s stories, somewhat irreverent, sassy, sexy, restorer of characters in history, experimenter with language and form, and mythmaker. It’s so great to have a front (wo)man writing for me. But every piece is, of course, informed by the life lived by the real author I worried to a friend: “But readers will think this book is too … [Read more...]

Waiting for Maxwell's Demon by Elizabeth Hazen My father is a geophysicist. As a child, I spent many hours on road trips to remote quarries where we would hike to an outcrop and spend hours splitting rocks, searching for fossils. While in retrospect I am grateful for these unique experiences, my younger self ­– and particularly my teenage self – rejected all things scientific. That was my dad’s realm, and I was going to be my own person. Perhaps because of my willful rejection of science-related material in my formative years, in my adult life I have returned to science with intense curiosity. … [Read more...]

Finding Myth By Rose Solari As a child, I distrusted mythology, as I did any literature that adults seemed to think was especially well-suited to kids. Tales of Mount Olympus, of Zeus and Hera and their many disruptive children, seemed to me to be just stories about people who never existed performing feats that were clearly impossible, not unlike Santa Claus. I much preferred, for example, the work of Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Bronte. In Little Women and Jane Eyre, I found believable tales that I could both enjoy and learn from, stories that helped me to grow up. I found my way … [Read more...]

Report from the West Coast: ASP’s Joanna Biggar Talks Paris, Then and Now March 28, 2018   The San Francisco Bay Area Group met March 10th for a timely presentation by Joanna Biggar, whose first novel, That Paris Year, was published by ASP in 2010.  Here’s a report: Joanna began her talk, entitled, “I Will Always Have Paris: A Writer in the City of Light,” by saying it would not be a PowerPoint, but rather a show and tell, subjective, intuitive, and circular.  She began by reading a segment of her essay in Wandering in Paris: Luminaries and Love in the City of Light, an … [Read more...]