Stacey Hettes

After writing three critically acclaimed memoirs and a decade of teaching memoir workshops at every level, Elissa Altman has helped students face the elephant in every writer’s room: how to craft the stories that are most vital to them despite the voices that have told them not to. Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you’ve been told you can’t, and how to how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision.

Teaching kindergarten in Thailand wasn’t the job Dian Seidel had in mind when, at age sixty and craving adventure, she convinced her husband that they should try working abroad. But coping with rambunctious children, sweltering heat, and COVID-19 turned out to be the challenge she needed. Struggling to understand Thai culture, their school, and their marriage, could she learn Thailand’s essential lesson: mai pen rai, don’t worry, keep cool? Part travel memoir and part second act story, Kindergarten at 60 is a retirement tale like none other.

Three women are lost in a single morning - one at a commuter train, one at a school, one while walking her dog in the woods. The police think the women are making some kind of political statement by setting themselves on fire. But Cassandra knows better. You won’t rest until Cassandra, a mom and former anthropologist, solves the mystery of these fiery deaths. Part mystery, part science fiction, part a suburban-domestic novel, Only the Women Are Burning asks important questions about women in contemporary, suburban lives.