“The artist must be deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need and harken to its words alone.” —Kandinsky.
Several years ago, I entered a Master’s in Creative Writing program as a poet, but I was equally interested in writing fiction and signed up for several short story workshops. My experience in the poetry classes led me into exciting new places as a writer, opening me up to undiscovered parts of myself and of the poetry world. But it has taken me many years to fully recover from the fiction workshops. (more…)
I recently read the book Words as Eggs by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart. The idea for the work, and the chapter from which the title comes, originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams. A voice in his dream said “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” (92). 
Welcome to Michelle Cameron, the author of Jewish historical fiction. Her most recent is Napoleon’s Mirage, the sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates. Previous work includes Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity, a finalist in religious fiction in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the award-winning Beyond the Ghetto Gates and The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz. Michelle is a director of The Writers Circle, a NJ-based creative writing program serving children, teens, and adults. She lives in Chatham, NJ, with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. 
I’m sitting in a classroom, facing my expository writing students. They stare blankly at me after spending the past few weeks together, delving into the essay’s puzzles, reading and writing, talking and thinking. I’ve just urged them to try to dramatize their thinking on the page. I say, “Most professional writers do it automatically.” 
As we sit here the week before the US elections and to my mind, the most important election in my lifetime, I wonder as I often have in the past, what’s the point of continuing to write in the face of all that worries the world. I felt this way after 911 and during the pandemic and the feeling is coming back again. I’ve been doing lots of political work which has lifted my spirits because, for me, action is the only cure for despair. But I’ve developed a powerful case of what I call “creative anxiety.” It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will again. I’ve been away from the novel I’m working on for over two weeks. My characters are calling to me from where I left them, mounted on horses, hiding in a thick forest, searching for a young woman who has fled a convent.
Curva Peligrosa, who entered this world in September 2017, has just turned seven. Who, you may ask, is Curva, and why should I care about her? If you’re also a Regal House Publishing author, you’ll want to give tribute to 
I’m grateful that I live in a big city where I am forced to rub up against people who are not like me.
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (
Valerie Nieman’s historical novel, Upon the Corner of the Moon, is now available for pre-order with the release set for March 2025. This is the story of the Macbeths you never knew, rightful rulers who united Scotland in the tumultuous 11th century. The second of the two ALBA books, The Last Highland King, will appear in 2027. In the Lonely Backwater, winner of the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award, has been called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy.” To the Bones, a horror/Appalachian/ ecojustice novel, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, and now has a sequel, Dead Hand. She is the author of three other novels, a short fiction collection, and three poetry books. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and NEA fellowships and is professor emerita of creative writing at NC A&T State University. 
Whenever I give a talk or reading, someone in the audience asks where my stories come from. I find the answer more complex that what it would appear to be on the surface. What are my narrative seeds? What starts me on these explorations of others’ lives? 
Winner of The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Prose Contest in 2016, 
Okay, I’ve been writing for longer than I care to remember, but I still can convince myself (arrogant? yes!) that I don’t need feedback from other writers. This attitude tends to take over when I’ve spent considerable time working on something, as I had with a memoir I’ve written. After all, it’s my story I’m telling. How could someone else help me to improve it? I don’t usually take this approach to fiction I’ve created; I assume it can be made better. But I’d persuaded myself that my memoir was ready to be published. 
Okay, so you’ve accomplished the impossible. An agent has expressed interest in your work and you’ve signed a contract. All those months (maybe years) of sending out your novel have paid off. Not only do you have an agent, but she’s in New York, on Park Avenue. A respectable established firm.
In addition to writing adult fiction and non-fiction, I also create pieces for children. Recently, I tried to start a children’s story of a girl sleeping in an elegant dollhouse based on a dream image that has stayed with me. But after a few sentences, I felt extremely critical of what I’d written. I had to stop. Let it breathe, I said to myself. Let the criticalness soften—fall away. 
A high-school dropout and a single parent at sixteen, my options were severely limited. I had a son to raise on my own, and I received no child support from his father. A quick learner, I parlayed the typing skills I had learned in my high school commercial course (it was assumed then that most women would end up as clerk typists or some version of that role) into a variety of office jobs after starting out as an office girl. Consequently, when I began writing my novel 
Bruno Schulz, the Polish writer, has become my new muse. I’ve been reading his first book, The Street of Crocodiles, and I’m fully captivated. His words and images have such energy that they practically levitate above the page: “A tidy thicket of grasses, weeds, and thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon. The sleeping garden was resonant with flies. The golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seedpods exploded softly like grasshoppers.” 
Full disclosure: I started this blog some time ago so I could create a “writer’s platform” to show agents and potential publishers. But it doesn’t come without a cost, and that is one’s privacy, even though my postings mainly focus on some aspect of reading and writing. 
Okay, I’ve been writing for longer than I care to remember, but I still can convince myself (arrogant? yes!) that I don’t need feedback from other writers. This attitude tends to take over when I’ve spent considerable time working on something, as I had with a memoir I’ve written. After all, it’s my story I’m telling! How could someone else help me to improve it? I don’t usually take this approach to fiction. I assume it can be made better. But I’d persuaded myself that this material was ready to be published. 
I can see why the French wanted to occupy Morocco in 1912. And I can also see the remains of that occupation. While the official seizure is over, the French (and others) still dominate. French is spoken as frequently as Arabic. And while officially France may not be in charge any longer, it still has a majority interest in most of the banks and other institutions. It’s not an easy relationship. Of the over 500 riads in Marrakesh’s Medina (the old section of Arab cities), only five or six are owned by Moroccans. That doesn’t mean only French people own the others, but it illustrates how powerless in certain ways some native Moroccans are.