Wasting My Time:



It's late and I'm freezing.



I was given this sorry excuse for a blanket and expected to keep warm.



What are they thinking?



The blanket has more holes in it than a block of Swiss…

"This was the first column I ever wrote for The Clinton County Record, and I post it every year at this time to mourn the loss of my friend, Sherry."



Last Wednesday morning after I drove my daughter to school, I returned home. I did my morning chores and sat down in my rocking chair to drink a cup…

We learned how to live.  Though we did go through more hard times, it was not enough to merely survive after the escape. Many new beginnings followed the times of darkness. Years of joy followed the times of despair. Love overcame the fear.

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My children and I built a new…

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Exhausted to the point of death, I lie in the deep sway of a musty green canvas army cot in my living room, alone.  My boombox radio…

It’s that time of year again.  The leaves are turning, the temperature is falling, and the over commercialization of the pink ribbon has started.

Yes…it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, that time of year when every product in Walmart, Target, and the grocery stores decorate their packaging with a pink…

Sarah Glazer Remembers Something Else that Could Only Happen to a Woman

 I was overwhelmed and touched by the generous comments from women in the She Writes community to my last blog  about my experience with attempted rape when I was a student at the University of…

Tsuris (noun): trouble, aggravation, or misery



      I’ve just completed a memoir in essays I’m calling, How I Lost My Bellybutton and Other Naked Survival Stories, in which I try to make sense of the ridiculous amount of tsuris I’ve had in my fifty-seven years. As I begin sending it out into a publishing world that’s become quite weird, I’m feeling surprisingly Buddhist. Of course I want to entertain, illuminate, and move others with published work, but…

Acclaimed literary nonfiction writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey, author of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, answers five questions from journalist Paula Kamen, author of Finding Iris Chang:…

Susan Conley’s new book, The Foremost Good Fortune, is a memoir about moving her family to Beijing and contending with breast cancer there. Here she answers five questions from Liza Bakewell, author of Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun. It’s a conversation about trusting the form you’re working in, finding the voice that suits that form, and what it’s like to write about disease far from home.  

Liza Bakewell: How did you find “the”…

Time has a funny way of fixing things. Over time, pain is forgotten, the bad times of the past are blurred, fear evaporates leaving only residue, and only the fading scars are left.

January 31, 1996 was a Wednesday and as I look back and remember the day, there wasn’t much on the world radar screen. A lot of things blew up around the world on this day, especially in Sri Lanka with bombs planted by the Tamil Tigers and trucks filled with explosives being rammed into the…

It is a strange feeling to publish a novel and have it take on a life of its own. The Washington Post ran a story yesterday profiling my novel Wench, a story that explores the complexities of the sexual relationships that existed between slave women and white men.  It mentions the people who have shared their own family histories of such unions in the context of reading the book. I do not know much about my own family's slave history, so I never imagined that such…

It's Deborah here and I have a confession to make.  I’ve been turning away, not wanting to look in full view at the tragedy in Tucson, not willing to truly let it all in.  I’ve been preoccupied with “other things.”  But after yesterday’s funeral for the youngest victim, Christina Taylor Green, that’s no…

Wendy Shanker--author of Are you My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation and Madonna Saved My Life--answers five questions from Susan Shapiro--Manhattan writing professor and author of the comic novels…