I keep running across blog posts and articles on the topic of older women. Most decry the fading of everything from bodies to influence. Some revel in the freedoms of post-family/career opportunity. (My own take on my encore writing career is here.) As background for my next novel, I am reading Philippa Gregory’s Three Sisters, Three Queens, and marvel at how Gregory has kept me fascinated during more than 500 pages through the narrative voice of a thoroughly unlikable Marga

With thanks to Story Circle Network, for publishing this piece in their 2018 anthology Real Women Write, Having grown up with a mother given more to issuing orders than advice, those pearls of life wisdom she chose to pass on stood out—both because they were rare, and because she so clearly lived by them herself. Given our entirely different personalities, and her impatience as a mother, I spent the first three decades of my life, resisting, defending against, and otherwise d

Good News! Hard Cider has moved to the short list for Chanticleer's Somerset Book Award for Contemporary, Literary Fiction!