Woman of the Hour—Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion
Woman of the Hour, my first flash fiction collection, will be published by Vine Leaves Press in July 2025.
I published my first piece of flash fiction in Hobart in 2015 and the response to it was encouraging. I went on to write a hundred more stories, practicing my skills and getting comfortable writing in English.
Dutch is my mother tongue and my novels were published exclusively in The Netherlands at the time. This felt odd to me, because I’d been living in Paris with an American for over a decade and read far more literature in English than in Dutch. I was growing more ambitious, dreamed of entering a more international market.
Writing in English made me feel vulnerable at first. Yet getting my stories and essays published helped a lot. Flash forward to 2024 and me signing a publication deal for a full collection.
Woman of the Hour, fifty tales of longing and rebellion, is a collection that will transport the reader from an Amsterdam canal to the Oaxacan coast, from a silt-streaked Venice to an imaginary world, from an Icelandic waterfall to a hall of mirrors. Resilient women show their extraordinary talents to prevail over the challenges they face—these are stories to hearten and inspire.
Gratitude
My huge thanks goes to:
- My agent, Marie Lamba, and the Vine Leaves Press team
- The editors who published flash fictions from this collection and nominated them for awards and anthologies: matchbook, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Monkeybicycle, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash: the short-short story magazine, Wigleaf, Fractured Literary, Fictive Dream, Hobart, The Sunlight Press, The Mambo Academy of Kitty Wang (Blink Ink Print), Lost Balloon, Connotation Press, Cheap Pop, FlashBack Fiction, National Flash-Fiction Day Anthologies, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Little Fiction, Atticus Review, Spelk Fiction, Showcase Object/Idea, Pithead Chapel, Bat City Review, Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine, Vestal Review, WhiskeyPaper, and The Rupture
- Fellow authors who critiqued my work and gave me the confidence to keep going; I cannot mention you all by name—our family is too big—but here are some of the most important ones: Lynn Mundell, Jaqueline Doyle, Jolene Mcllwain, Lisa Ferranti, Jonathan Cardew, Dawn Miller, Corey Farrenkopf, Gabrielle Griffis, Stacy Burns, Jennifer Kircher Herman, Julie Zuckerman, Elka Ray, and Janie Gluckstein
- Two Vine Leaves Press authors who shared their experiences with the publishing process with me last fall, Jennifer Friedman Lang and Jayne Martin
- Husband, friends, and family who encouraged me over the years: you know who you are.
- The kind people on various platforms who shared my work or spent the time reading it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sneak Peek
Would you like to have a sneak peek at some of the stories in Woman of the Hour? Please consider reading:
- “Woman of the Hour” in Fractured Lit
- “New Leader” in: Cheap Pop, selected for the Wigleaf Top 50
- “Mirror” in: Cincinatti Review, nominated for Best Small Fictions
- “Closed Circle” in The Sunlight Press
- “Woman of the Century” in: matchbook, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions
Or find your own favorites on my short prose page.
