I just finished reading Crowley’s The Solitudes with great relief. I haven’t hated a book so much in a long time, but I felt obligated to read it for the reading group I belong to. From the first page, I struggled to get interested in the work, rereading the first 30 pages or so two or three times and still not able to enter it emotionally or intellectually. The clumsy ungrammatical sentences (lots of comma splices) and clunky phrasings made him lose credibility with me from the start. Here are some examples of bad sentence structures: (more…)
Why do I write? Because if I don’t, I feel as if part of myself has checked out. It’s as important to me as food. Okay, it is food, the word like a communion wafer that melts on my tongue, nourishing body and soul. It’s also like having a lover that never loses his attractiveness, beckoning on the fringes of my days, waiting to embrace me. 
For thirty years now one of my favorite teaching topics in memoir classes is showing characters.
I’m not your garden variety Canadian. I don’t own a Hudson’s Bay blanket. I don’t go to hockey games anymore. I’ve stopped being nice. I’m no longer so polite. And I gave up my citizenship when I became an American many years ago. But I can’t seem to shake my country of origins, especially now that Trump has become so enamoured with making Canada the 51st state. It makes me want to give up my American citizenship and leave this country that he’s destroying. But at my age, such a move would be extremely difficult. I’ve lived in the America three times longer than I have in Canada. 
I wish I could get excited about graphic novels. I looked at Maus many years ago and tried to get into it. I couldn’t. I didn’t like having prefab images put my own imagination on hold. I didn’t like the lack of complexity I enjoy so much in a literary novel (no graphics). It was like watching tv in print. Everything is oversimplified. Reduced to its lowest common denominator. 
I first went to work in publishing five decades ago. It was a move I made consciously in order to understand the inner workings of what was then called Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) because I wanted them to publish my work. I started out as an editorial assistant in the department headed by the legendary 
American films tend to follow a three-act story structure with a key turning point at the end of the first and second acts. Memoir has no single formula like that for its structure, though it’s not a free-for-all. There are options to choose from.
During my life, I’ve spent considerable time in therapy, psychoanalysis, and self-reflection, examining dreams, my relationships with people in the external world and with the “little people of the psyche.” 
A writing friend of mine has papered her bathroom with rejection slips. Viewed in that context, they become less weighty and are put into perspective. As writers, we tend to think of rejections from publishers as negative. But rejections also can be gifts in disguise, offering us a way to make lemonade out of lemons.
After I recently published a guest post by Suzanne Sherman on my blog, I responded to her challenge to write nonstop for 10 minutes about why I write. What happened for me confirmed her discovery that “writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.” 
California, even in January, still has spring-like qualities, though April always makes me a little nervous. All that new green showing itself. Flowers. Plants. Reveling in an ecstasy of self-indulgence. For a Canadian, such excess seems suspect. But California, northern California that is, doesn’t care. It just keeps making these spring-like gestures, warming up one day. Cooling the next.
At a New Year’s Eve party, someone asked if I’m writing lately. I said yes, I’m always writing. The next day, I decided to sit down for 10 minutes to explore the reason for my answer. Writing nonstop for 10 minutes on the topic turned out to be another good example of how writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.
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. On my blog today, I’m talking to fellow Regal House author Gary Eldon Peter, author of Oranges, a linked short story collection, and the novel The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen (such an incredible title!)
July 11, 2022
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Bio: 
Gary Eldon Peter is the author of two works of fiction: Oranges, a linked short story collection published by New Rivers Press, and the recently released novel The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen, published by Fitzroy Books/Regal House and winner of the Acheven Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Oranges received the Gold Medal for LGBT+ fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Midwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and has been performed on the public radio program Selected Shorts. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota. You can learn more about Gary and his work at garyeldonpeter.com (more…)
Valerie Nieman has been a reporter, farmer, sailor, editor, teacher, and always a walker. She is the author of In the Lonely Backwater, called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy,” four earlier novels, and books of short fiction and poetry. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and NEA fellowships. You can find her online sites at 
Linda Rosen’s books are set in the “not-too-distant past” and examine how women reinvent themselves despite obstacles thrown their way. A central theme is that blood is not all that makes a family– and they always feature a piece of jewelry! Her debut novel, 
Once upon a time
Leslie Lehr’s Bio:
Grace Sammon is an entrepreneur, educator, speaker, and author. She has started and managed two for-profit and two not-for-profit companies, and she has travelled to 35 states and 8 foreign countries. Recognized in “Who’s Who in Education” and “Who’s Who in Literature,” Grace is utilizing skills built up over decades as she re-invents herself with her award-winning fourth book and debut novel – 
shift from writing nonfiction in your earlier work to fiction? What preparation did you have to do?The shift was easier than you might think. Even in my research-based, data-driven educational works there is an element of story. I believe that we connect best to each other when we understand the art of story and the role that story has in connecting us to the prime message of our work. That’s true whether it’s the importance of improving our high schools in the United States or conveying the message that our literary stories matter. When our stories are told, everything changes.
Mary Byrne’s prizewinning short fiction has been published/broadcast and anthologized, in print and online, in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Mary has taught English in universities in Paris and Normandy, and has also worked as an editor and a translator. Currently collating collections of short fiction set in Morocco and Ireland, she lives in Montpellier, France.
On my blog today I’m talking to the lovely and lively Judy Crozier. Her early life was a sweep through war-torn South-East Asia: Malaysia’s ‘Emergency’, Burma’s battles with hill tribes, and the war in Vietnam. By nine, Judy had read her way through the British Council Library, including Thackeray and Dickens. Home in Australia, she picked up journalism, politics, blues singing, home renovation, child-rearing, community work, writing and creative writing teaching, proof reading and editing, and her Masters of Creative Writing. Then she escaped and went to France, where she now lives.
Betty Jane Hegerat pens stories in the splendid writing community of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where she also teaches, mentors, and offers reading and substantive comment on selective works.
On my blog today, I’m delighted to be in conversation with the lovely Bonnie Lee Black, a woman who has been Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, Central Africa, who has conducted an independent economic development project in Mali, West Africa, and who has been a professional writer and editor for over 40 years. She currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
On my blog today I’m talking to Pat Taub, a family therapist, a journalist, a writer/host for the Syracuse NPR station program “Women’s Voices,”a writer for Key West Magazine, and a writing teacher. Pat explains how her memoir, The Mother of My Invention, helped her make peace with her troubled relationship with her mother.
After Regal House Publishing recently released Cliff Garstang ‘s new novel Oliver’s Travels, I asked him to be a guest author on my blog and sent him some questions about his writing process, including how he comes up with titles, the origins of his characters, literary inspirations, what feeds his writing, how he researches his books, and more.
Joseph Carrabis Bio
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