On episode 71 of the WRITER 2.0 Podcast I spoke with author and former accountant G. Elizabeth Kretchmer. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touched on:
- the accounting firm that helps out the Academy Awards;
- our shared obsession with mountaineering;
- how she got, and lost, her literary agent;
- a difficult book club appearance;
- her love/hate relationship with marketing;
- the value of an in-person book launch;
- 3 books that changed her writing life;
- her novel, TheDamnable Legacy and her new book of short stories, Women on the Brink.
Plus, on “Today in Writing,” Aldous Huxley writes a letter to George Orwell.
About our guest:
Elizabeth Kretchmer grew up on the south side of Chicago, the youngest of three children in a family that revered the annual summer vacation. They traveled east to frolic in the waves of the Atlantic, north to ride untamed horses in the Canadian Rockies, and south to barter for trinkets in the border towns of Mexico. But her favorite trips were always to the Great American West, where raptors soared and mountains loomed and evergreens towered overhead, and where history and adventure and spirituality seemed somehow inextricably and inexplicably linked to the landscape. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, she found a permanent ticket to the West and has lived there ever since.
Although Ms. Kretchmer earned her undergraduate degree with her left brain, subsequently working for a number of years in public accounting and high technology finance, she found her right brain was becoming increasingly assertive and unsettled. At last, she retired from the business world, ostensibly to raise her three real sons, but in truth she has also been raising a cast of mostly fictional characters who have been seeking her guidance and discovering their personal truths and journeys along the way. Ms. Kretchmer is now a full-time writer of novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction.
The Damnable Legacy was her debut novel, independently published July 2014 and republished by Booktrope July 2015. Women on the Brink, a short story collection, is coming out October 2015. Ms. Kretchmer is currently working on a novel set in the Yellowstone area.
When she’s not writing, she’s helping cancer patients, domestic violence survivors, yoginis, and others experience the transformative power of the written word through her therapeutic and wellness writing workshops.
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