Showing results by publisher "She Writes Press" in All Categories

The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection - but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was 47 years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: Her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her world shifted on its axis.

When her brother dies of AIDS and her husband dies of cancer in the same year, Rosemary is left on her own with two young daughters and antsy addiction demons dancing in her head. This is the nucleus of The Art of Losing It: a young mother jerking from emergency to emergency as the men in her life drop dead around her; a high-functioning radio show host waging war with her addictions while trying to raise her two little girls who just lost their daddy.

I’m So Glad You’re Here is the story of a family disrupted by ramifications of a father’s mental illness. Poignant and powerful, I’m So Glad You’re Here is author Pamela Gay’s exploration of the idea that while the wounds we carry from growing up in fractured families stay with us, they do not have to control us - a reflective journey that will inspire listeners to think about their own relational lives.

Leaving a successful career in the US, a father makes a fateful decision to settle his wife and two young daughters on an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings and declares they are the luckiest people alive. In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes, and in the grip of a brutal dictator.

In Weaving Myself Awake, Gail Warner takes us through an intimate inquiry into what is sacred. This book of spoken poems is a late-in-life weaving of heartfelt awareness and an inquiry into the divine feminine that was previously hidden. Accompanied by blended images that speak to the story or theme of a given poem, the book is divided into the following sections, all arenas of life that beckoned Warner’s curiosity and deeper inquiry: longing, birth, grief, grace, seeing, wonder, sanctuary, beauty, empowerment, collaboration, mystery, and joy.

Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in the campus town to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not.

Born into a Hassidic Jewish family in Poland in 1924, Mendek grew up surrounded by extreme anti-Semitism. Armed with an ingenious mind, he survived three horrific years in Nazi slave-labor concentration camps while virtually his entire family was murdered in Auschwitz. After arriving in America in 1946 — despite having no money or professional skills — his inventions helped revolutionize both the jewelry and packaged-salad industries. Remarkably, Mendek also applied his ingenuity to his own psyche, developing innovative ways to heal his heart and end his emotional suffering.

There are more outlets than ever for writers to spread their messages and share their work, more opportunities to speak out and be seen. Writers expose themselves freely and willingly in a way that would have been unfathomable 50 years ago, and more people than ever are writing and publishing. Men and women are writing with equal fervor and commitment to their message and craft. As a result, it’s easy to assume, or hope, that the gendered playing field is a thing of the past, too. Unfortunately for women writers, it’s not.

It's 2014, and Amy Daughters is a 46-year old stay-at-home mom living in Dayton, Ohio. She returns to her hometown of Houston over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss her parents’ estate and finds herself hurled back in time. Suddenly, it’s 1978, and she is forced to spend 36 hours in her childhood home with her nuclear family, including her 10-year old self.

Valeria Vose: A Novel takes a listener deep inside the cultural and emotional life of a 1970’s southern woman. Privileged, approaching age 40, her “perfect” life is shattered. Determined to survive, she’s forced to confront all preconceived values and expectations in order to find a path toward creative, spiritual independence and her true identity.

Jo’s mother, Babe, liked to drink, dance, and stay up very late. When the husband she adored went on sales calls, she waited for him in the parking lot, embroidering pillowcases. Jo grew up thinking that the last thing she wanted was to be like her mother. Then it dawned on her that her own happiness was derived in large part from lessons Babe had taught her.

Kavita Basi had a wonderful life - a job she enjoyed, a wonderful family, and seemingly perfect health. Then an unexpected event took place and turned her entire world upside down. In Room 23, Kavita chronicles her time suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage - bleeding in the area of the skull surrounding the brain. With this diagnosis, Kavita went from being healthy and happy to battling a condition with a 50 percent mortality rate.

In 1933 in the Shenandoah Valley, there isn't a place for Lum (short for Columbia), a 33-year-old intersex woman. She travels by schedule from one branch of the family to another, assisting with cooking, childcare, and housework. Always an outsider, even in her own family, Lum secretly collects postcards of people like the Dog-faced Girl, imagining their stories, and nurtures her lifelong friendship with Smiley, an African-American man who sells furniture, odds and ends, and a little moonshine.

Katherine Murphy, a pediatric surgeon in San Francisco's premier medical center, UCSF, was raised in the ironic protection of her father's Irish pub by a patchwork family formed of misfits and orphans. She is book-brilliant, but unwise in the ways of love and life. When genuine love and deep passion present themselves in the form of Jake Bloom, a renowned "artist of the immediate", she is in far too deep before she discovers the treacherous dark side of his creative genius.

As a college administrator, Gwen Plano lived her professional life in a highly visible and accountable space - but as wife and mother, after hours and behind closed doors, she experienced the terror of domestic violence. It was her secret; it was her shame. But when her husband turned his brutality on her son, she could no longer stay quiet.

On the advice of a five-dollar psychic, Tina Martin, a zany, overworked mother of two, quits her high-powered job and moves her family to Shanghai. Tina yearns for this new setting to bring her the zen-like inner peace she’s always heard about on infomercials. Instead, she becomes a totally exasperated fish out of water. Fish Heads and Duck Skin will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered who they are, why they were put here, and how they ever lived before eating pan-fried pork buns.

Greece. Politics. Love. Danger. Reeling from a failed marriage and spurred on by a burgeoning sense of feminism, twenty-five-year-old Kate accepts a position as a speech therapist in a center for children with cerebral palsy in Thessaloniki, Greece. It is 1974, and the recent end of Greece’s seven-year dictatorship has ignited a fiery anti-American sentiment within the country. Despite this, as her Greek improves, Kate teaches communication to severely disabled children, creates profound friendships, and finds a home in the ancient and historied city.

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her. Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she decided to leave city life behind.

In 1960, six years before Marty Ross-Dolen was born, her maternal grandparents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets over New York City. They were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement for their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. Their daughter—Marty’s mother—was fourteen years old at the time. This genre-bending memoir tells Marty’s story of being raised by a mother in protracted mourning.

Fans of women's memoirs about second acts, self-reinvention, and finding strength after divorce will connect deeply with Deb Miller's honest, witty account of what happens when the fairy tale falls apart—and real life begins. Deb was raised to believe in Prince Charming, permanence, and the promise that love guaranteed a happy ending. Faced with the collapse of the story she'd built her identity around, she had to decide: rewrite the narrative or remain stuck inside it