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Editor’s note: Sadly, Iconic acclaimed author, poet, columnist and massage therapist Yvonne Zipter died Feb. 10 due to complications from ovarian cancer. She was 71. Her last novel, Infraction, was published by Rattling Good Yarns Press. She wrote this article shortly before her passing. We were devastated by her loss, and it is only now that […]

My one true desire has never wavered: to become a published author—and briefly an archeologist, because I thought dinosaurs were so cool. I never doubted I would be a published writer, though. To create living, breathing worlds and characters that experience far more than I ever could. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Unfortunately, for

Let me be clear from the outset, I am probably the last person who should give advice to an aspiring author on how to get published. I am at the midpoint of my 67th year, and my first book, Tales of the Lavender Twilight, has just been released. I am not sure if you can

You get an idea; you write. Sounds simple. However, for many who have thought they could write a book, the task of beginning suddenly becomes enormous. Even though I taught writing for years in public school, I honestly never thought I’d be able to write an entire novel, much less as many as I’ve published over the years. So, here I offer an easy guide. Or not so easy, as the case may be, but it might be helpful…

I consider myself a survivor thanks to my writing. I wouldn’t have survived certain situations and experiences in my life if I hadn’t had an impulse to write. You see, I was a child in Cuba during the 1959 Revolution, a historical event that greatly impacted our lives—the whole world, really. Led by two young

I’ve loved traveling for as long as I can remember, but rarely had the means to do it. My first trip to Europe overlapped the last week of my last quarter at U.C.L.A. My roommate, a Russian Studies student, invited me to join him on a two-month summer journey across Western Europe that would eventually

Like a lot of writers, I would often think, while dashing off a poem or wrangling with some plot twist in a novel, “If it pleases me, it will please others.” Isn’t that what they teach in adult education writing classes? It certainly was true for me back in the Ford Administration when I wrote

When I think about being a gay author and why I feel it’s essential to hear gay stories, my mind goes back to the beginning of seventh grade. Before, I was “gay” or a “Homo,” as they used to shout, I was just a weird kid. Being silly and playful was allowed for a child,

My first book was The Radical Act of Community Storytelling, a memoir/how-to/advocacy for the power of storytelling. I wrote it because I had been successfully producing an event, Odyssey Storytelling, in Tucson, Arizona, for several years, and I was in love with the whole process. I spent years learning to put on a monthly show,

  Every time I visit a museum, no matter how keenly focused I am on what I’ve gone to see, I’m always ambushed by some unexpected discovery. This was the case a few years ago when I was touring the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I’d gone there to see their pre-Columbian

Whenever I’m developing a main character for a work of fiction, certain traits jump out at me immediately, as they do in real life when I meet someone for the first time—the more observable aspects such as physical appearance, gender, age, race. As I come to know a character better—again, just the way I get

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, every other Monday at around precisely 6:35 pm, a group of about seven to ten writers gather regularly around the cozy mismatched furniture of the Shades of Brown coffee shop to sit quietly in a shared space for nearly two hours before staggering out one by one into the busy shopping area