Today’s post by author Maria Goodin |

Maria Goodin

The older I get, the more time appears to speed up. I talk to people about ‘last summer’ only to remember the event I’m describing occurred two years ago. I forget to organize dentist appointments, convinced that I only went for a check up the other week. Even little things like shopping lists throw me into confusion; didn’t I just go shopping yesterday? If so then why do we have no food in the house?

Nothing makes time go faster for me than writing. I’m not one of these people who can scribble a few lines here and there, on the bus, in the bath, whilst stirring cheese sauce on the hob. I need hours in front of me. Three of them at least. It takes me half an hour to read through what I have previously written in order to get in the creative frame of mind, and that’s before I even start writing. But once I get going the concept of time is lost to me.

I wrote my first novel over the course of a year, only writing perhaps two or three days a month whenever the weekend allowed it, but on the days I wrote I would sit down first thing in the morning and could still be there at ten o’clock at night. Eating was a nuisance and only something I remembered to do once my stomach was rumbling. An aching back or a dead leg would eventually remind me that I had been sitting in the same position for hours. The increasing gloom would force me to acknowledge that somehow morning had turned into afternoon had turned into evening. I would finally emerge from my writing cocoon stiff, sore, thirsty, red-eyed from hours in front of the screen and a little confused about where the day had gone.

In my novel my central character, Meg, tries to slow down time. In the face of her mother’s terminal illness she tries to stretch out those final days, doing as little as possible so that their time together feels longer. But she is forced to accept that she is fighting a losing battle. Time is like sand, slipping through her fingers. It’s a cruel fact of life that the moments you would chose to cling to forever are the ones that rush past you at high speed. How is it that time goes so slowly when you having a quiet day at the office or waiting for a train on a cold platform, yet that holiday you had been looking forward to is over in the blink of an eye, and surely your child can’t be going to school already.

One reader said my novel made them think about what’s important in life. If that’s the case, then I deem that a great achievement. You can’t stop life’s precious moments in their tracks, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is simply to acknowledge how precious those moments really are.

Maria Goodin is the author of From the Kitchen of Half Truth. She trained to be a teacher and therapist before working as a counselor. Based on her award-winning short story, From the Kitchen of Half Truth was inspired by her interest in psychological defenses. Maria lives in Hertfordshire, England with her husband, son and cat. This is her first novel.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by author Jennie Shortridge | @JennieShortridg

Jennie Shortridge

Love Water Memory was inspired by a very big truth: a newspaper clipping. The Seattle Times headline read (in print edition): “His memory fails him, but his heart won’t forget.” An Olympia man who went missing was found by his fiancée six weeks later in Denver, where he’d traveled after experiencing a rare form of amnesia called dissociative fugue. She went to get him and they began life together again, even getting married, though he didn’t remember who she was.

The questions this story evoked were too big not to write about. I wanted to get inside of that situation and figure it out: how do two people find their way back to their relationship after such a thing? Who are we, really, without our memories? And ultimately, what makes us, well, us?

I changed the genders and locations. I researched many cases of dissociative fugue and the medical information available about it. I created Lucie, a woman who “comes to” standing knee-deep in the San Francisco Bay and Grady, her fiancé who comes to take her back home to Seattle, carrying a few burdens of his own.

And because dissociative fugue is caused by emotional trauma rather than physical, I imagined and wrote Lucie’s inducing trauma. It would take some time for me to realize that what I’d written was not completely fictional, even though I’d thought it was at the time of writing it. My own childhood trauma had surfaced. The fictional scene was far more dramatic, as fiction needs to be, but its roots were my own.

My first instinct was to erase it. How could I let this very private thing out into the world? But it was only from this place that I could be sure to write with some measure of verisimilitude, because that’s what it takes to write good fiction: a big dose of true emotion. And my own story needed a little sunlight, anyway, to take the toxic murkiness out of it. As clichéd as it sounds, the truth can set you free.

Perhaps this is what writing and reading fiction is all about: infusing difficult or scary situations with the emotional truth. That way, we arrive somewhere new and more fully realized than the real world can sometimes be.

A bittersweet masterpiece filled with longing and hope, Jennie Shortridge’s emotional novel explores the raw, tender complexities of relationships and personal identity.

Who is Lucie Walker? Even Lucie herself can’t answer that question after she comes to, confused and up to her knees in the chilly San Francisco Bay. Back home in Seattle, she adjusts to life with amnesia, growing unsettled by the clues she finds to the selfish, carefully guarded person she used to be. Will she ever fall in love with her handsome, kindhearted fiancé, Grady? Can he devote himself to the vulnerable, easygoing Lucie 2.0, who is so unlike her controlling former self? When Lucie learns that Grady has been hiding some very painful secrets that could change the course of their relationship, she musters the courage to search for the shocking, long-repressed childhood memories that will finally set her free.

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Jennie Shortridge has written five acclaimed novels, including Love Water Memory and When She Flew. When she is not writing or volunteering, she stays busy as a co-founder of Seattle7Writers.org, a nonprofit collective of authors whose mission is to promote literacy in their community.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by t by author Peggy Hesketh | @PeggyHesketh

We’ve got a copy of Peggy’s debut novel, TELLING THE BEES, up for grabs today. Leave a comment on this post and you’ll be entered to win.

Peggy Hesketh

A couple months ago my husband texted me: Want to adopt a beehive?

My reply was something like: Are you nuts?

When I was a little girl I used to go running barefoot through the clover.  This is not a metaphor.  I hated wearing shoes.  I loved to run, scamper, frolic, call it what you will. I was a tomboy whose summers were spent chasing bugs and fly balls. There was an exhilarating patchwork of gardens, fruit trees, and green lawns and fields spotted with clover in which I did all of the above.

The first time I stepped on a bee, it hurt like hell.  I’m pretty sure I cried.  The second time I stepped on a bee, it hurt even more. The third time, the pain escalated, along with the swelling in my foot.  The fourth time, it was my whole leg that ballooned.  This is when I was told I was allergic to bee stings and was ordered to keep my shoes on.

Fast-forward half a lifetime.

Two elderly beekeepers lived a couple miles down the road from where I lived.  I used to nod at them as they sat on their front porch selling honey, as I drove by their house on my way to work.

And then one day there was police tape wrapped around their house.  I read a short article in our local newspaper the next day that said they’d been murdered in a burglary gone wrong.  I keep wondering how such a thing could happen.

I’m not sure why this incident haunted me.  And to be clear, nothing in the book I ended up writing has anything to do with these ladies who died 30 years ago other than I was profoundly sorry that they had died, and as their home and everything around it disappeared I mourned the loss of a time and place where I grew up.  The story I wrote is about my family, which took place 3,000 miles away from where the actual Bee Ladies lived and died.  My story is simply about  memory and the complicated relationships that grow tragically brittle with time.

I used beekeeping as a metaphor for this loss.  As I said, I am allergic to bee stings.  But I am no longer afraid of bees.  In the course of my research for this novel, I learned that queen bees don’t look like tomato worms (I think I’d confused bees with termites in that long ago stuttering first draft).  I began reading beekeepers handbooks, philosophers’ treatises on beekeeping, historical and scientific documents, odd out of print fiction and bee-related mythology.  Eventually I began stopping by farmers’ markets to talk with the honey sellers and visiting beekeepers homes to watch them, from a safe distance, practice their craft.  What I learned over time was that there is a beautiful, seasonal rhythm to life that bees embody, one that has inspired ancient civilizations from Egypt to Greece and Rome to revere honey.

And meanwhile, I had begun to tend an herb garden in my back yard.  I started noticing the honeybees that came to collect the pollen from my rosemary and basil blossoms.  I watched them fill their pollen sacs to the brim before flying away.  I started to understand the fascination humanity has with bees.  I began talking to what I began to consider “my bees.”   I even learned not to jump when a bee landed on my arm.  I learned to simply wait for it to grow bored and fly away of her own accord.

But still…

Adopting a hive of my own?  How would I care for it?  One bee on my arm is one thing.  A hundred thousand?  And in our tiny suburban backyard where there are so many less fields and trees and flowers that nourished the bees that used to visit my herb garden  each spring?

Are you crazy?

No my husband said.  You  don’t need to bring the hive here.   There is an organization: http://honeylove.org/team/ that is rescuing beehives here in SoCal.

So I contributed to their cause.   Yet to receive the promised T-shirt, pendant, or even confirmation of the promised naming of the queen bee of my hive.  These little perks weren’t the reason I contributed to this organization.  I’ve come to love honeybees and genuinely believe I am doing something good.  I want to believe.

Add TELLING THE BEES to your Goodreads “Want To Read” list.

With echoes of The Remains of the Day, an elderly beekeeper looks back on his quiet life, and the secrets of a woman he never truly knew.

Albert Honig’s most constant companions have always been his bees. A never-married octogenarian, he makes a modest living as a beekeeper, as his father and his father’s father did before him. Deeply acquainted with the workings of the hives, Albert is less versed in the ways of people, especially his friend Claire, whose presence and absence in his life have never been reconciled.

When Claire is killed in a seemingly senseless accident during a burglary gone wrong, Albert is haunted by the loss, and by the secrets and silence that hovered between them for so long. As he pieces together the memories of their shared history, he will come to learn the painful truths about Claire’s life, and the redemptive power of laying the past to rest.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by author Ann Hood 

We’ve got a copy of Ann’s latest novel, THE OBITUARY WRITER, up for grabs today. Leave a comment on this post and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Ann Hood

Update: the winner of of this giveaway is Katherine Jones. She has been notified via email. Thanks to everyone who entered. Please check back soon for more great book reviews and giveaways!

At my friend’s dinner party, she seated me next to a man I did not know. Dinner that night was butternut squash lasagna, and lots and lots of wine. The man was witty and sophisticated, and he regaled me with stories of his years in the Middle East. With all the food and wine and conversation, the night became a pleasant blur, a successful dinner party.

A few days later, my friend called. In a flat voice, she told me Steven was dead from a heart attack. It took me a few minutes to realize that Steven had been my dinner companion. His round flushed face appeared in my mind just as she said: “Will you write his obituary?”

It is true that I am a fan of obituaries. I even have a favorite obituary writer, Robert McG Thomas, who wrote obits for the New York Times, including his own. But being a fan of reading obituaries is very different from actually writing one. Before I can explain any of this to my friend, she is reminding me that I told Steven I would do this.

“I did?” I manage to ask her.

“Yes. He said that he loved your writing and that you should write his obituary and you agreed.”

I want to tell her that I said that hypothetically, after lots of wine. I said that to a man who did not know he was going to die forty-eight hours later. But what I say instead is, “Of course I’ll write it.”

For the next few days, I worried over what to say about this man. What a responsibility it is, I realized, to sum up an entire lifetime in so few words. Remembering his love of his time in the Middle East, I read Arabic poetry and found quotes about life and love. I did not write an obituary, but rather a short story about this man.

In the end, I knew two things: that the day you were born, the degrees you acquired, the facts of your life, these things do not tell your story. And I knew that I would write a story about an obituary writer, a woman who moves through her own grief by honoring the grief of others. Yes, I wrote Steven’s obituary, but by doing so he, in a way, gave me a gift as well.

A sophisticated and suspenseful novel about the poignant lives of two women living in different eras.

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, an uncompromising young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie O, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless marriage or follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between Claire and Vivien will change the life of one of them in unexpected and extraordinary ways. Part literary mystery and part love story, The Obituary Writer examines expectations of marriage and love, the roles of wives and mothers, and the emotions of grief, regret, and hope.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post from author Gwendolen Gross | @GwendolenGross

Gwendolen Gross

Update: the winner of of this giveaway is Nancy Pate. She has been notified via email. Thanks to everyone who entered. Please check back soon for more great book reviews and giveaways!

I used to drive an ancient Saab named Lemon to and from Oberlin College, a twelve to fourteen hour drive from the Boston suburbs, with other students I knew, or with people who found my flyer flapping tabs on the union bulletin board. I’d retrofitted the sagging ceiling with a sound system for the radio and tongue-in-groove wood ceiling, but she was still a lemon of a car. Most of the time, we split the cost of gas, and sang every show tune we ever learned for the first ten hours or so, until our throats were raw and some of us were falling asleep. Sometimes I picked up the wrong person—someone who would short me the twenty five in gas money, or who sat back and farted and complained about road noise and didn’t join in the singing, but mostly, I was lucky. On one trip in particular I brought with me Noah and Jeff, and somewhere in Pennsylvania after grinding gears for a while after a toll booth, the stick-shift lever broke off and we had to hold the ragged metal stump in third gear and drive in the break-down lane all the rest of the way.

This particular drive isn’t in the book, but the idea of reckless trust, of the particular raw desire and bravado of young adulthood is right in there. Sometimes things seemed so urgent that were not urgent (and we had no cell phones to text the ex-boyfriend and ask him what he meant by signing his last note with “love”), and things that could have been a disaster (I didn’t have enough gas money for the whole trip—and the breakdown lane or the guy who knew someone I knew but I’d never met could have been really dangerous) were just an adrenaline-inducing addition to the background music.

We all make choices we regret—we all get lucky with some of them. The space between embarrassing mistake end deadly one almost seems like a single clock-tick. I wanted to write about how that impulsiveness, how the imbalances we ascribe to young adulthood, might fit into lives at any stage. How everyone is looking out of the windows at the same thing, but seeing something different.

I wrote When She Was Gone with mistakes in mind, with multiple narrators who make multiple mistakes—Reeva sees a pink sweatshirt that could be Linsey’s, off-stage, Mr. Leonard lets love go, Abigail thinks she is paying attention to her daughter when in fact she isn’t seeing the very things she’s looking for. I was fitting pieces as I wrote, thinking of those optical illusions where in one direction, you see the profile of an old hag, and if you squint, you see a maiden of beauty and grace. I think living in the world is just like that—sometimes you look at something twice, and it is entirely different.

We’ve got a copy of WHEN SHE WAS GONE up for grabs today. As usual, just leave a comment on this post and you’ll be entered to win.

What happened to Linsey Hart? When the Cornell-bound teenager disappears into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning, her quiet neighborhood is left to pick apart the threads of their own lives and assumptions.

Linsey’s neighbors are just ordinary people—but even ordinary people can keep terrible secrets hidden close. There’s Linsey’s mother, Abigail, whose door-to-door searching makes her social-outcast status painfully obvious; Mr. Leonard, the quiet, retired piano teacher with insomnia, who saw Linsey leave; Reeva, the queen bee of a clique of mothers, now obsessed with a secret interest; Timmy, Linsey’s lovelorn ex-boyfriend; and George, an eleven-year-old loner who is determined to find out what happened to his missing neighbor.

As the days of Linsey’s absence tick by, dread and hope threaten to tear a community apart. This luminous new novel by the acclaimed author of The Orphan Sister explores coming of age in the shadows of a suburban life, and what is revealed when the light suddenly shines in. . . .

Add this novel on Goodreads.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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