The long, strange journey of Literary Ladies Guide

How an art school project became a blog, a book, a web archive, and an audiobook

In this newsletter, I spend 99.98% of the time presenting the lives and works of classic women authors who should never be forgotten (or who have been forgotten and should be rediscovered). After all, that’s the mission.

But today I’m going to do some thing a little different and talk about someone much harder for me to talk about — myself.

The Substack community somehow invites creators to forge a more personal connection with readers, and some have expressed interest in what my creative process looks like. So today, I’m going to go behind the scenes with the story of how a vague seedling of an idea grew into several unexpected directions — a blog, a limited edition, a trade book, a web archive, and an audiobook.

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Going to grad school because of a dream

It started when I decided to enroll in graduate school at the age of forty-eight. I wasn’t thinking about going to grad school at all, at least not consciously. One night I had a dream that I should go to grad school. At the time, a friend of mine was a professor in the art department of SUNY-New Paltz.

When I called this friend and told her about my dream, she invited me to sit in on the first session of a new, interdisciplinary art program she was heading. As luck and good timing would have it, this meeting was to take place in late August, couple of weeks after the dreamer in me received this nocturnal message. I went, I saw, and was hooked.

Cover of the Dear Literary Ladies limited edition

Once I figured out why I was back in school, I decided it was a great opportunity to bring my graphic skills into the 21st century by learning InDesign and Photoshop. At the same time I wanted to learn something more retro — how to make limited edition artist’s books, which in a nutshell are books or book-like objects conceived as works of art. To illustrate, here are the limited editions I’ve done in the years since.

One of my last classes explored the crafting and hand-printing of very small editions. Ever the book nerd, I had the idea of collecting inspiring thoughts by well-known women authors on writing and the writer’s life. I made an awkward and wobbly little book in an edition of three. It left a lot to be desired in terms of execution, since making books by hand is a craft that requires much practice. Conceptually, it was also unremarkable.

Dear Literary Ladies — the early blog

Still, after I received my MA in Art Studio from SUNY-New Paltz (many moons after earning my BFA from the University of Michigan), the idea lingered to do a project of some kind collecting inspirational quotes and advice from classic women writers.

First off, I started a blog on Blogger called Dear Literary Ladies, in which I posed hypothetical questions about the writing life and found answers in the first-person writings (diaries, autobiographies, interviews, and the like) of women writers.

I was going to go searching for this blog on Wayback Machine to share with you here, but much to my surprise, it’s still live! I’m kind of flabbergasted, as I abandoned it (you’ll find out why) in 2011. Above are a few screenshots from the Dear Literary Ladies blog but you can see the whole shebang here.

Dear Literary Ladies — the limited edition

Around the same time, I created a limited edition, also titled Dear Literary Ladies (2010), in an edition of twelve. Shortly after receiving my MA I was fortunate to have my limited editions represented by an art dealer that specializes in this kind of work. They have placed my limited edition in billions, or at least dozens, of Special Collection libraries in colleges and universities all over the U.S.

Here’s an image from the interior of Dear Literary Ladies, the limited edition, whose cover was shown earlier.

And here’s a flat spread from the interior of Dear Literary Ladies, intended for wall display.

Diving deeper and looking for a publisher

As if this weren’t enough obsessing about women writers, at the same time that I was working on the blog and the limited edition, I put together what I thought was a decent proposal for a trade book titled Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life.

Delving more deeply into the lives of women writers flipped the script on what this project was really all about. Yes, these writers were sources of inspiration. But what became more interesting and was how they struggled, strived, and overcame obstacles, just as much as writers and other creative people do.

These iconic authors fought inner demons, wrestled with self-doubt, felt the sting of rejection, and had money and family troubles — just like us mortals. They triumphed in the end, though it was rarely a case of “and they lived happily ever after,” but their bumpy journeys that made the book more valuable and relatable than just a collection of inspiring aphorisms.

Today, for the most part, agents send proposals out to editors as pdfs in emails. But way back in 2009, proposals often went out in snail mail packages. I put together a small booklet to visually demonstrate my vision for the book.

The proposal made the rounds of publishers, mostly receiving tepid responses, until it caught the eye of Mark Chimsky, who was at the time editor-in-chief of Sellers Publishing in Portland, Maine. Sellers specialized (and still does) in gift books, anthologies, and calendars. Mark has a more literary background, having headed up MacMillan’s paperback division and others back in the day.

Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life had found a home.

I am dragged out of the gutter

In one of our initial exchanges, Mark noted that I had referenced Colette, who happens to be his favorite author, in my proposal booklet. So I sent him the page from the Dear Literary Ladies limited edition featuring Colette (shown earlier). That, he declared, was more like what the trade book should look like.

And further, my commentary in my little booklet proposal was set in the smallest font that could be seen by the naked eye, and was literally in the pages’ gutters. Mark told me very nicely but in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t hide my words in the gutter. My commentary on the first-person writings of the classic authors highlighted in the book had to be the same size font and in the same proportion to theirs and displayed prominently in the pages. Gulp, I’m shy!

Mark, in his diplomatic gentleman-editor manner, got me out of my shell when it came to creating visual nonfiction outside of the food space. Up until that time, I had published a number of successful vegetarian and vegan cookbooks (plus two books of satire — fun, but they didn’t really go anywhere).

First pages from Chapter One of Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life, trade edition

Mark left Sellers just a few years after Literary Ladies Guide was published and started his own editorial consulting business. He helps writers shape book projects in all stages. He has worked on so many books in his career, but if you link through to Mark Chimsky Editorial, you’ll see that he has Literary Ladies Guide displayed prominently on the banner and behind him in his head shot (right next to Johnny Cash’s autobiography!) If you’re working on a book project that needs some editorial shaping and guidance, reach out to Mark.

As an aside, I’ve been beyond lucky to have worked with several wonderful editors over the years. I’m still friends with Mark, as well as with the first Jennifer, with whom I worked on several books for almost twenty years (something unheard of in today’s revolving door publishing world) and the second Jennifer, who shepherded a few more of my books into the world.

The Literary Ladies Guide Website

When Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life was published in 2011, I had absolutely no platform in the writing/lit realm (the Dear Literary Ladies blog hardly counted). So it was quite challenging to promote the book. I gave readings at a couple of great bookstores and arranged to do a “blog tour,” guest writing on about a dozen writerly blogs that no longer exist. But I was doing things backwards and was out of my depths (I’m happy to say I no longer feel that way).

Around 2012, in a backwards kind of way, I decided I needed a more serious website to support the book, and launched the Literary Ladies Guide website. I posted on it catch as catch can, so by 2016 it was in a complete death spiral. It didn’t really start taking off until around 2018, when I began mentoring students from the communications department of SUNY New Paltz as interns.

Teaching students how to write for a website made me sharpen my own skills and strategies and to be more consistent with growing the site. Literary Ladies Guide now has had contributions of content from all over the world, about 1,400 posts, and millions of views logged on the site to date.

Suddenly, an audiobook

Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life went out of print a few years after it was published. A couple of years ago I got the notion to do a revised and updated edition. I wanted to add three writers I’ve grown to know and love in the intervening years — Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Octavia E. Butler.

My agent gamely took this proposal around, even though publishers generally aren’t excited about revised editions, especially when the original didn’t particularly sell well. There were no bites until Blackstone Audio made an offer to bring it out as an audiobook.

Blackstone got my dream reader — Robin Miles — to read the book, and I’m thrilled with her performance of it. All this said, it hasn’t been easy to promote a standalone audiobook. Most of the time, audiobooks are connected with a newly published book, and all its attendant publicity. That said, it was so gratifying to be able to update this project and feel like I closed the circle and it is now as it should be.

If you enjoy listening to books, learn more about the Literary Ladies Guide audiobook. Find it on Audible, Apple, Libro.fm, and wherever audiobooks can be downloaded.

What’s next?

Literary Ladies Guide — the website/archive and this newsletter will keep continuing to grow! It’s one of 5 or 6 things I’m involved with but the passion still burns. I also run TheVeganAtlas.com and its companion here on Substack. I have two books coming out — Inspired by Cats: Writers and Their Feline Muses, illustrated by the talented Bob Eckstein (September, 20205). Women Writing Dangerously, which you’ll hear more about in the months to come, is what I’m hard at work on now (to be published in September 2026).

I hope you enjoyed this peek into the sometimes bumpy, often unexpected, yet gratifying and unexpected paths that an idea can take as it makes its way into the world. Literary Ladies Guide’s regularly scheduled program of celebrating women’s writing from the recent and distant past will return in a few days.

Meanwhile, have a good Thanksgiving holiday, how ever you celebrate; and if you don’t, it’s a great time for some quiet reflection and/or creativity.