My fourth interview, Fred Perry won the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition for Television/Movie Script. He has a whole list of awards to his credit and (I sound like a broken record) I loved reading his answers. I love that this venture has allowed me to meet such different writers with such great responses. Enjoy! Tell...

Third installment in my series of interviews with first place category winners in the 82nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. I’m so glad I decided to do this because there is such variety among these writers, and all of them are really interesting and articulate (imagine that). Enjoy! Tell me about your winning story. Where...

Second installment in my series of interviews with first place category winners in the 82nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. (First interview, with Julia Byers, can be found here.) Finding Stephanie seems like a beautiful bit of serendipity. She’s a gorgeous writer, and she writes of her search for herself after she lost her mom,...

When I heard about the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition awards, on the advice of a friend who’s known for having brilliant ideas about social media, I decided to contact all the first place winners in the other categories and try to find out more about them — the story behind the winning story, what else...

I’ve known about this for a couple months, but the official issue of Writer’s Digest came out last week with my name listed: First Place Winner in Inspirational Writing Category! When I decided to attend the Elizabeth Berg Writers Workshop in Positano, Italy, last October, it was a huge leap of faith — telling the...

a pseudo book review My friend Peggy talks about “nuggets” — the best part of a message, what she takes away from it. My “pseudo book reviews” are just that: the one or two things I will remember, maybe all from one chapter. It may be a particular phrase or thought that changed the way...

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. ~Anne Lamott  

Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. ~C.S. Lewis

Here’s the thing. As American consumers, we are used to people catering to us. Sometimes we forget — or, in my case, don’t really know — how our products get to us. We don’t know, or maybe don’t care, that some of the workers on these farms are, literally, modern-day slaves. Or that the divers...

a pseudo book review* *My friend Peggy talks about “nuggets” — the best part of a message, what she takes away from it. My “pseudo book reviews” are just that: the one or two things I will remember, maybe all from one chapter. It may be a particular phrase or thought that changed the way...