One of the joys of my encore career as an author is getting to know other authors and share our work and paths to writing. I met Michigan author Lynne Golodner through the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She had just completed her first novel but her writing career extends all the way back into childhood. Read on to learn more!
Have you always been a writer or did you come to this from another career?
I have always been a writer. My mother says I wrote my first story when I was 6! And, I keep a corduroy covered journal from the ‘70s behind my desk to remind me of who I’ve always been. That said, I spent 15 years as a journalist and then started a marketing company, Your People LLC, which I still run today. So I’ve been writing all that time, but not always books. I wrote and had published 8 books (2 poetry collections & 6 nonfiction books) between 1996 and 2013, all “labors of love” and projects on the side of my paying work. About 5 years ago, I decided to shrink my business and focus on writing novels. I also ramped up my teaching of writing, to surround myself with all things writing, and now I only take on marketing clients in the publishing and writing world, like authors learning to market their books and brand themselves.
From what I can gather, you have lived /traveled in many places in the world. Why is that, and how has it informed your writing?
I love to travel and have been very fortunate to have wonderful opportunities to go places and see gorgeous landscapes. At midlife, it’s even more important to me to spend time in other places not as a tourist, but as part of the community. In 2022, I spent a month in the Scottish Highlands on writing sabbatical and it was then and there that I discovered the real people in history who became the inspiration for my forthcoming novel, CAVE OF SECRETS. Last year, I spent a month in Nova Scotia on writing sabbatical. In both places, I connected with the local writers community and focused on writing and being in nature. I continue to do that every year – a month somewhere new to me to know the place and get away from my regular life to write.
You are a poet, a journalist, a podcaster, a novelist, a teacher, book reviewer, and publisher, just to name a few aspects of your writing career. How do you think writing in all these different ways has produced benefits or challenges?
My novels are both women’s fiction and all of my books have Jewish identity as a theme (among others).
But yes, I’ve been doing a lot of different things that are related to writing. I love interviewing writers because it teaches me more about how to build an author career and write beautiful books and stories. I’m not really a poet or journalist anymore, but both of those careers (including my MFA in Writing and my long journalist career) inform one another. For example, my poems were always very factual and researched, and my creative nonfiction can be very poetic. I hope I incorporate both of those expertises in my fiction. And, as a publisher, I get to shepherd a book from manuscript to being out in the world and into people’s hands. I love the book-making process, start to finish!
You are a supportive, and dedicated literary citizen … lifting up other writers and bringing vitality to the conversation about books and their authors. Why is it important to you to do this work on behalf of other writers?
Most writers are, by nature, introverted people, and I love building community, bringing people together so they feel less alone. It helps me, too, to connect with like-minded writers! I’ve also had the benefit of very generous, attentive mentors throughout my writing career, and so I’ve learned from the best. The writing community as I’ve been part of it has been generous, nurturing, supportive and encouraging – I can’t think of a better way to be!
What else would you like readers to know?
I’m writing a book a year for the rest of my life, and it is such great fun!! And, I am now booking visits for my book tour over the next year, and welcome invitations from book clubs, universities and Jewish communities.
Lynne Golodner’s A Woman of Valor offers a different premise and alternate solutions to the tropes of misogyny, communal insularity and subjugation that characterize many representations of ultra-orthodox communities. Sally, the novel’s main character is the narrator, and walks the reader through her life, beginning 10 years into her choice to become an orthodox Jew, willingly leaving her secular upbringing on the heels of a humiliating, ruinous breakup with her first love. Golodner’s skill in developing Sally’s character— flawed, authentic and dimensional— keeps the reader engaged in the real conflicts the novel presents without resorting to caricature. Sally’s resolution of these dilemmas avoids all-or-none dichotomies,. This Woman of Valor tells an important contemporary story of faith, love, devotion and self-determination.
Coming August 27th A contemporary romance with hints of magical realism, Cave of Secrets is about family heritage, intergenerational trauma, and finding the courage to be honest with ourselves — and those who love us.
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