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Miriam Herin, Author
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  • Home
  • Meet Miriam
  • A Stone for Bread
  • Absolution
  • Buy
  • Short Stories
  • Blog Posts
  • Events
  • Contact

Why We Write

 

But isn’t it really about personal fulfillment?

 

If you’re a struggling writer, you’ve probably had someone say this to you. In my long and frustrating journey to publication, I heard this a number of times, usually from friends who meant to encourage me. And, yes, there have been moments when I’ve asked myself the same question. Can’t the act of creating stories be an end in itself? Process as payoff, our work shared with friends and families.

Certainly there’s joy in the process, those “yes!” moments in writing fiction, when the right image or plot development comes to us while we’re driving to the dentist or taking a walk. It’s exciting to see our characters, who begin as shadows, morph into people as real to us as a niece or co-worker. Such moments are as close to magic as this writing thing gets.

But although I love the very act of writing, I write to publish.

Vocation. Profession. Two words that originated from the Latin verbs “to call” and “to declare publicly.” Work as dialogue. Writing can and should connect us with people who share our neighborhoods, our towns, our planet, or else we work in a closet. Those of us who are writers may do the actual work in that closet or quiet space, but the truest satisfaction comes with the conversation. That, for me, is what publishing means.

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A Stone for Bread by Miriam Herin

Recent Posts
  • On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Bread won the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Published by Livingston Press of the University of West Alabama, the novel received a starred Kirkus review through the Kirkus Indy program and was cited by Kirkus as an Indy Best book of the year for 2016. It was a 2017 Finalist in the International Book Awards, Literary Fiction category.
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon: THE BASILISK, a novel of 12th Century France
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon, Miriam’s medieval novel THE BASILISK
    February 17, 2022
  • 1. Lucky, The Backstory: A Grassy Field and a Basketball Goal
    April 9, 2019
My Readers Say

With a sharp eye for detail, Herin weaves a riveting and compassionate narrative out of lifelines that have echoed across the decades and become part of my own.

L.C. Fiore

This is a supremely ambitious book from a thoroughly gifted writer.

Joseph Bathanti

But here’s the main thing I have to tell you: A Stone For Bread is an irresistible page-turner.

Judy Goldman
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