Susan’s nonfiction work includes memoir, life story, and life choices, as well as books about writing.
If you’re a woman who writes or a woman who would like to write, if you’ve ever journalled just for yourself or written family history for your descendants, if you long to tell your own story to your family and friends or to the world, this book will help you get started and keep writing each and every week for a whole year.
In An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, novelist Susan Wittig Albert invites us to revisit one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, 2008, through the lens of 365 ordinary days, when her reading, writing, and thinking about world issues—from wars and economic recession to climate change—caused her to reconsider and reshape daily practices in her personal life.
In this beautifully written memoir, the author of the popular China Bayles mysteries meditates on what it means to be married to a person and a place while needing to be alone, in solitude. How do we balance our desire for private time with our need for community? How do we give ourselves fully and intimately to a place, while at the same time satisfying the desire to reach out to far horizons?
How do women experience the vast, arid, rugged land of the American Southwest? The Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women write about their lives, posed this question, and nearly three hundred women responded with original pieces of writing that told true and meaningful stories of their personal experiences of the land.
From the book: “Our stories must be told, so that the women who come after us will know that their foremothers were more than just the characters in men’s tales, that we are dimensional, intentional beings with minds of our own, wills of our own, dreams of our own. Our stories must be told. My story, your story, women’s stories. And you and I are the only ones who can tell them, because we are the only ones who have lived them.”
If you feel discouraged about your creative options in the workplace, frustrated with entrenched beliefs that don’t reflect your values, and disillusioned about your career, Susan’s book will help you. It tells her own personal story—the work-life she left, the reasons why, the contentment she found in new work and a new life. It also tells the stories of over a hundred other women who left positions of leadership and authority to create work that expresses more deeply who they are as women.
