Author Pages
The ForeWord Author Pages put the spotlight on authors and their thoughts. We invite selected authors of books we review to tell us about themselves, or they may choose to answer a series of questions from our editors. The results illuminate how they grew to become writers, how they write, when they write, how they maintain their creativity and much more. To read an author's page, click on his or her name.
At Bread Loaf, the poets William Meredith and Maxine Kumin were encouraging to me, along with fiction writer Laurie Colwin, and soon I was publishing my first poems in quarterlies...
One activity in particular must have contributed to the fostering of my creative courage. I would sit before a typewriter and tell my mother I was going to write a story for her....
Originally I had an agent for this book who tried to sell it to the Trades, and several almost took it; then the marketing teams decided they wouldn't make the bottom-line...
The best advice I can offer is to trust yourself. Be open to what comes your way, notice the gems that surround us; the ones that life so often disguises as rocks. Read. Listen to...
Many years ago, I first conceived the idea of writing a cultural study of cool. But it was only when I sat down to write it that I realized that cool as a social force was in...
The eight stories in this book represent almost seven years of work. There were a lot of other stories that got written during that time, but not all of them were right for this...
"I recommend trying to write an entire book through without endlessly looking things up, then going back and doing the looking-up later. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne...
I always wish there’d been somebody around to say, "it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get published." Because in fact it did matter and if I hadn’t been published when I...
I think my characterization of Death breaks every stereotype we’ve been subjected to. I hope it will surprise my readers. The perspective expressed in this book is a distinctly...
Where I grew up, there was no kindergarten. The town was a coal and cattle town, and academics weren’t stressed, so when I entered first grade I could not draw the alphabet. We...
I grew up in a quiet little town that was once infamous for having been the site of a mine “massacre” in the 1920s...and I’ve long wondered how to reconcile the violence with what...
The best advice I've received is also the best advice I can offer. Sam Freedman, my book writing professor at Columbia University, had this to say on writing narrative...
I was born with a tongue-tying stutter that made me mostly mute throughout my formative years. Partly because of the stigma, I never applied myself at school. But reading came...
The book enabled me to build the house of my dreams, even if it was only on canvas. To share this with small children, explaining to them what goes into building a house is just...
After writing so many technical works, we have found that trying to write about science for the general public is difficult. In fact, the greatest obstacle we had to overcome in...
If you are convinced that you have a good idea- go for it! Write it but be willing to invite feedback and make changes.
The second major influence on my writing was David Smith, my close neighbor and friend for several years while I lived in Dingwall, Ross-shire, in the Highlands of Scotland. Dave...
Consistency is key, but don't get hung up if nothing happens in a daily session, or if even a week or two goes by with little to show. Alternate between looking at the big...
I wanted "real" stories. I think I wanted some kind of sexual tension in the stories. I don't mean erotic, necessarily, but differences of perception between the...
Even when care is taken, so many hours are consumed in creating the first draft, the edit (and edit and edit), and the ensuing submission process, which can be both intensely...
It was inspired by my elder son, Harris, who at four was frightened by and then worried about a man we came across sleeping on the sidewalk. He suggested weeks later that we...
My first "real" job was selling advertising space for a small magazine. I hadn't realized before this time that a lot of people really can't write. And I'...
Today military doctors are being told to under-diagnose PTSD while as many as one in nine soldiers have tried to get help. In my book I recount how, sixty years after my uncle...
I have never found that writing from my own experience, writing about what I know, has served me as well as writing from the springs of imagination.
Write in your journals to keep your writing muscle flexible, and also because it's kind of therapeutic.
I try to write as quickly as possible. No agonizing about this or that word. Get the story out.
I have just finished writing a memoir about how I, a girl from the midwest, grew up to be a winetaster living an enviable life in Italy.
The wine I enjoy drinking is the wine that is in my hand at the moment.
It was only later in life, when my experiences with the poor needed to be expressed to a larger public that I decided to write a book.
I like working as a team and being involved in every part of the book's development and distribution.
I often think I'd be very happy all by myself in a mountain cabin with a typewriter, then I remember my family and it doesn't look quite as enticing.
Seeing the poetry of words come to life was a remarkable experience, and made me certain I wanted to be a writer, but I just wasn't sure I had the talent.
Tamara Cofman Wittes bills her new book as a "skeptic's handbook" for building a serious, long-term democracy promotion policy for the Middle East.
When I first thought I could write, in sixth grade, the experience annihilated me. I thought I might never put pen to paper again. My girlfriend was gone, and my life was over,...
That was the first book I ever read where the characters (for once no longer animals), got drunk, threw up, and were full of existential angst.
