Happy New Year and Halloween

Happy October and Shana Tovah to all who observe. This month, we’re off to Morocco, where we are running a six-day writing retreat in Marrakech and the High Atlas Mountains. Workshops in the mornings, “open mic” in the evenings, hikes, cooking classes, and visits to the souk and YSL museum in the afternoons. Writing + reading + 10 women traveling overseas. What could be better?

If you would like to join us stateside, we are also running a one-day writing retreat in New York City on Friday, November 4. Details below. Stay tuned for details about more writing retreats in 2023.

We just finished Alice Elliot Dark’s Fellowship Point, one of the most absorbing novels we’ve read. The story is about two friends, Agnes and Polly, who grow up together as privileged Quaker girls in Philadelphia and age into fiercely intelligent women in their 80’s, devoted to each other and the beautiful property they preside over in Maine. It’s a story about women and friendship, women and marriage, women and motherhood, and women alone. It’s also about navigating a life with a parent who is mentally ill, and what it’s like to defy convention (Agnes) and embrace it (Polly). The book is almost 600 pages and not long enough.

Speaking of stories about women who support each other on the page (and stage), Leah Michele and Tovah Feldshuh are fantastic in Funny Girl.

Clients getting published:

Adele Aron Greenspun, The Uses of Sorrow (Snapdragon Journal)

Leslie Dannin Rosenthal, Snack Plate (Grande Dame Literary)

Juicy reads:

Rachel Kushner, A King Alone (fiction), The Hard Crowd (nonfiction)

Jill Lepore, The Rescued Portrait of My Italian Grandmother (nonfiction)

Yiyun Li, Oral History (nonfiction)

Helen Longstreth, A Recipe for Forgiveness (nonfiction)

Toni Morrison, The Work You Do, The Person You Are (nonfiction)