When I started writing my novel Turin, I believed I understood what the book was about. It began with my grandfather, a Jew from Turin who was forced to leave everything behind after Mussolini’s racial laws. For a long …
The Writer Laid Bare
Writing as the World Changes: A Guest Post by Andra Putnis
The world we start writing in is never the same one we inhabit years later as we seek to finalise our work and publish. Fast moving global conflicts, political ruptures and the rapid pace of climate change have made this …
Finding the (not-so-fine) line between history and fiction: A Guest Post by Merav Fima
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that it would be interesting to imagine a meeting between the four great female English novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. She …
What Made Me Finally Write a Book: A guest post by Rachelle Unreich
The desire to write about my mother’s Holocaust story had been with me for awhile. Like, thirty-five-years awhile. I had been a published writer from the age of 19, when on a whim I’d sent a humorous piece about my …
Writing in the Dark: A Guest Post by Katherine Kovacic
I spend a lot of time thinking about death. Not in a philosophical sense, but the how, when, what and why of death in every conceivable form. Messy and unblemished, quiet and very loud, tragic and stupid, unremarkable and unbelievably …
Finding the Central Question of Your Story: A Guest Post by Karen Kirsten
I spent nine years grappling with a manuscript I couldn’t complete. Not because I lacked compelling material. My mother and grandparents had survived the Holocaust; there were dramatic stories of love and betrayal, rescues and buried secrets. But I couldn’t …