Women who stand out and dare to seize their power have been maligned throughout history. Even today many people are uncomfortable about the very idea of a powerful woman. Witness how Hillary Clinton was demonized in the 2016 presidential campaign. What other U.S. presidential candidate has been called “nasty” by their opponent or had their opponent literally looming over them during a live televised debate? Even women who would never dream of running for political office face every day misogyny and threats of violence for daring to speak out on the internet. It doesn’t matter what the woman has to say—the fact that she has spoken out at all has made her a target.  

I certainly encountered the “such a nasty woman” phenomenon while researching Alma Schindler Mahler, the protagonist of my new novel Ecstasy. Born in Vienna in 1879, Alma Maria Schindler was an accomplished pianist and…

Weaving was an important skill in many cultures around the world, allowing humans to create textiles from natural fibers found around them. For those readers that weave, they will know the magical feeling of creating that comes from weaving, knitting or the like. The creation of an object out of seemingly nothing; that two simple strands of thread can be woven into magical patterns. Weaving becomes a metaphor for creation: we weave our way through our own lives, tangling with the threads of others. Words woven together become stories and songs with which we can share our experiences of existence.

Now, there isn’t a single mythology that doesn’t love a metaphor, so here a few ways that weaving has been used to tell our stories.

We have previously written about the Fates of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. The three sisters that weave in the underworld, doling out the threads…

I told you yesterday I’ve been enjoying some light, frothy, sunny-weather reading in the form of Siegfried Sassoon’s 1930 tale of the horror and drudgery of World War I: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.