Hear us Roar

The podcast this week features Wendy Adair (The Broken Hallelujah, indie published, October 2022). Once Wendy had her core idea, snippets of facts as well as sources seemed to appear serendipitously, including the old trunk of a loved one. And we delve into genre – how she set out to write a women's fiction novel that morphed into another often overlooked genre as well, what it was like to discove...

This week our guest is Gloria Mattioni (California Sister, Atmosphere Press, September 2022). Gloria, originally born in Italy, wrote six previous books before penning her women's fiction debut, a story loosely resembling a traumatic incident in her own life. The memoir form proved too painful to write and a screenplay hid the interiority needed to understand the sisters, but a dual POV novel prov...

Our podcast guest this week is Nancy Yeager (When We Were Friends, Red Adept, October 2022).   This was Nancy's debut women's fiction although during the time she worked on it with both a book coach and a developmental editor, she wrote and released six historical romances and six contemporary romances. This novel (one inspiration was a Steve Miller song) was complicated by not only two POV's but...

This week's podcast guest is Anastasia Zadeik (Blurred Fates, She Writes Press, August 2022). Her novel, which won the prestigious 2022 Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction, examines the role memory—whether suppressed, purposely hidden, or misremembered—plays in a person's life and how one of the worst days of her life gave her the insight to tell the story. We talk about how she found the perfec...

Our guest this week is Suzanne Moyers ('Til All These Things Be Done., She Writes Press, September 2022). We discuss her historical fiction debut, loosely based on her grandmother's life story and how sometimes research isn't onerous but fascinating when you find a fact in the past that provides context to a plot point or an old photo that sparks inspiration for the world-building necessary to bri...

This week's podcast guest is Judith Turner-Yakamoto (Loving the Dead and Gone, Regal House, September 2022). We discuss how she pulled her manuscript just before it was going to press because she realized she needed to "kill someone", how even though she worked for 20 years as a publicist, she still considers the publishing business a deeply strange pond, how getting comfortable with sharing deepl...

Our latest podcast features Jacqueline Boulden (Her Past Can't Wait, Pine Place Press/indie, September 2022). We discuss EMDR, a new therapeutic treatment that plays a central role in her novel and has been effective in treating people suffering from PTSD, how Jacqueline's background as a reporter both helped and got in the way when she entered the world of fiction, and the valuable advice and sup...

The guest this week is Carol Van Den Hende (Orchid Blooming, Azine Press, September 2022). We talk about what happens when a character you weren't expecting comes onto the stage and demands to be heard, how Carol bought back the rights to her first book so she could stretch herself and become the publisher of her 3-book series, how she's incorporated her life goals into her writing journey, and ho...

This week's guest is Tamatha Cain (Song of the Chimney Sweep, Orange Blossom Publishing, August, 2022). We discuss Tamatha's love of not only the musical heritage of Jacksonville but also true crime podcasts and how she was able to mash the two together in her dual time-line debut novel which tells the story of a missing woman, an interracial marriage, and a mystery played out over the airways. We...

In this week's podcast with L Maristatter (Tiny Tin House, Niffy Cat Press, August 2022), we examine what she did when her manuscript grew to 380,000 words (chopped it up into bite-sized pieces and made it a trilogy), the challenges of writing a novel that takes a clear political stance (including working hard to make it more than a revenge screed), how essential it is for an indie author to not s...

This week's guest is CJ McGroarty (Clara in a Time of War, Atmosphere Press, September 2022). We talk at length about the world-building inherent in writing historical fiction, a genre that requires the author to not only pay attention to historical facts and real-life events but also be attuned to more subtle details like language, word choice, and style of dialogue and the existing norms of gend...

T oday's podcast features Leslie Kain (Secrets in the Mirror, Atmosphere Press, September 2022). We discuss how she writes out her action story first, in cinematic scenes, then goes back and adds in the emotional interiority and reactions later, making sure to not lose the magical voice which is crucial to bringing the reader into the story.  Her background in psychology informs her tale of two id...

In this special edition, we talk round-table style with three of the hard-working volunteers behind making the 10 th Anniversary Celebration a success:   Jamie Beck, heading up the Agent Pitch and Query Letter happenings, Wendy Rossi, interim co-chair of the event (which means her fingerprints are pretty much everywhere), and Erin Quinn-Kong, in charge of our great line-up of guest speakers and wo...

This week's guest is Adele Holmes (Winter's Reckoning, She Writes Press, August 2022). We discuss the complexity of not only writing three-POVs of different age groups and gender in her debut novel but also setting it in a tumultuous time period (the rural south of 1917 America) when the KKK was resurging and both women's rights, civil rights, and secondary education were under attack. A former pe...

Our guest this week is Carol Dunbar (The Net Beneath Us, Forge, September 2022). A successful actor in Minneapolis, Carol realized she was a storyteller working in the wrong art form so she switched from the world of the stage to the world of the page and moved off the grid with her family to rural Wisconsin. Her debut is the story of a woman who must deal with grief and open herself up to communi...

This week's podcast guest is Angela Cairns (Touch, indie published August 2022). A resident of the UK, Angela's fiction is informed by her work as a physiotherapist and healer. We talk about the rich history of storytelling and its ability to reach people at a deep emotional level and her belief that moving even one reader makes all the hard work behind producing a novel worthwhile. An entrepreneu...

Our podcast this week features Sharon Peterson (The Do-Over, Bookouture, August 2022). Tempted to give up writing when faced with raising four children (two with special needs), a downsized husband hospitalized with COVID, and the loss of her house in a natural disaster, Sharon turned to blogging as free therapy and with a sense of humor, a dose of humility and a tendency to overshare, discovered...

This week our guest is Dianne Braley (The Silence in the Sound, Koehler Books, August 2022). Her experience working on Martha's Vineyard as private nurse to William Styron, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Sophie's Choice, provided the framework for Dianne's debut novel as well as her childhood trauma of growing up with an alcoholic parent. We discuss author platform (she runs a popular blog for n...

Listen here to our interview with Rita H. Rowe (Becoming Ruthless. Indie published, October 2021). Rita's a prolific writer, releasing eight books so far with others around the corner yet she's still learning and growing as an author, particularly when it comes to how to publicize her work. We discuss her organic method of writing (pantser all the way) and how her first novel sprang from an event...

This week we talk with Maggie Ginsberg (Still True, Univ of Wisconsin Press, September 2022). Maggie, a journalist and magazine editor, always thought the novelists she admired were born with "magic author brains", that ideas simply flowed out of their fingers onto the page. It was only after she decided to write a book herself that she discovered the similarities with er non-fiction interviews—th...

This week's podcast features Carolyn Clarke (And Then There's Margaret, Black Rose Writing, July 2022). As the founder and resident guru of HenLit Central, Carolyn had a wealth of knowledge and contacts to draw from when she made the leap to novelist. Her idea to write a coming-of-middle-age story morphed into this light-hearted but ultimately touching tale of the challenges when your life include...

This week's podcast is with D.F. (Donna) Kennedy (The Truth, indie-published, June 2022). We talk about her journey from writing a memoir about her unique and often trauma-filled life (sexual abuse, kidnaping, foster care) to changing her story into a fictional piece and how that decision unleashed her creative juices, ultimately resulting in a 3-part series she wrote for rapid release. We discuss...

Tune in to our podcast episode with Staci Greason ( All The Girls in Town, Touchpoint Press, July 2022). In her early twenties, Staci was a regular cast member on Days of Our Lives , a popular daytime soap, but she had things she wanted to say in her own words rather than other people's so she switched to writing. But that acting background still comes in handy when she's writing dialogue scenes a...

Give a listen to our interview with Lisa Williamson Rosenberg (Embers on the Wind, Little A, August 2022). Lisa's life has been a study in duality. She's a self-described Black Jew, a ballerina turned shrink, and a recovered anorexic and bulimic responsible for feeding her family. Her novel began with the local legend of a ghost from the abolitionist period said to haunt her in-law's familial summ...

In honor of Women's Fiction Day 2023, pull up a chair and listen to this special edition of Hear Us Roar celebrating Women's Fiction Day 2023. Our guests on the episode are Orly Konig, Kerry Lonsdale, and Laura Drake, three of the founding members of the Women's Fiction Writers Association. We discuss how and why the group got started "way back when", the struggles of the early days, and how the o...