Diane Mapes, editor of Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out On Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness, is the author of How to Date in a Post-Dating World (Sasquatch 2006), a funny journalistic take on the traditional dating manual. Her satire and reported essays on dating, singles’ rights, television, travel, freak magnets, naked sushi, swingers and more have appeared in Bust, Christian Science Monitor, Health, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC.com, Seattle Times and the Washington Post. Happily single, she lives in Seattle, where she does not own a cat, a car, or a condo but does have her own column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled The Singles File.
About the Contributors
Rachel Kramer Bussel writes the Lusty Lady column for The Village Voice, hosts In The Flesh Reading Series, and serves as Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations. She’s edited nine books of erotica, including Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z 1 and 2, Ultimate Undies, Sexiest Soles, Glamour Girls: Femme/Femme Erotica, and Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists, with more on the way. Her writing has been published in over 80 anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2004 and 2006, as well as AVN, Bust, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, Gothamist, Mediabistro, New York Post, Oxygen.com, Penthouse, Playgirl, San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, Velvetpark and Zink. Her web site is www.rachelkramerbussel.com
Sasha Cagen is the author of the cult hit Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics (Harper San Francisco 2004) and the founder of International Quirkyalone Day, a growing alternative to Valentine’s Day that celebrates all forms of love on February 14. Quirkyalone has been optioned to be developed as a television show. Her second book, To-Do List, based on her popular magazine and blog (todolistblog.com) of the same name, provides an interactive look at listmaking and what our lists say about us. To-Do List will be published by Simon & Schuster in October 2007. Sasha Cagen lives in San Francisco.
Freelance journalist Amanda Castleman has lived in England, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and America. She larks around the globe on assignment, which does nothing for her romantic prospects. But she’s headstrong enough to try marriage again, if the right mood and man ever struck. When not mocking her muddy roots, Castleman’s contributed to the International Herald Tribune, MSNBC.com, Wired, and Salon, plus the BBC, The Guardian, and The Mail on Sunday. Her book credits include Frommer’s, Michelin, Time Out, Rough Guides, and Greece, A Love Story. She teaches through Writers.com. Her website is www.amandacastleman.com; she egocasts further at http://roadremedies.blogspot.com.
Margaret Cho is one of America’s most successful comedians, as well as one of the nation’s leading political and civil rights activists. She has received awards from the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Lambda Legal, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, for making a significant difference in promoting equal rights for all, regardless of race, sexual orientation or gender identity. Her essay, I Am Getting Married, is from her second book, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight.
Suzanne Cope is an author and professor living in the Boston area. She has published essays on food, travel, and popular culture that have been published in various newspapers and journals as well as two nonfiction books for children. A recent graduate of Lesley University’s MFA program, Ms. Cope is finishing a family memoir about her childhood spent at her grandparents’ airport, entitled Wingwalking: Growing Up on the Other Side of the Runway.
Bella DePaulo is a scholar of singlehood and the author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Newsday, and online at Alternet and The Huffington Post. She began her career as an academic social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard, 1979) studying liars and their lies. She lives in Summerland, California, and has been single all her life. Her web site is www.belladepaulo.com
Litsa Dremousis wrote, directed, and produced the plays, “If I Wake Before I Die” and “9:00 in the Afternoon”. Her work appears in The Believer, BlackBook, The Black Table, McSweeney’s, Monkeybicycle, MovieMaker, Nylon, Paper, Paste, Poets and Writers, Seattle Sound, Seattle Weekly, Swivel, and on NPR. Among others, she has interviewed Sherman Alexie, Augusten Burroughs, Death Cab for Cutie, Demetri Martin, Colin Meloy, Sean Nelson, Tim Blake Nelson, John Roderick, Wanda Sykes, and John Vanderslice. She is a winner of BlackBook’s Hemingway Short Story Contest. Her short story, “The Cousinfucker,” appears in Monkeybicycle’s upcoming comedy anthology.
Jane Ganahl is a columnist and author who wrote for San Francisco newspapers for twenty-four years; a version of her essay, “Faux Boyfriends,” originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Ganahl is also the cofounder of Litquake, a Bay Area literary festival. In 2005, she edited the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age and has contributed to two other collections, including Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick and The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives. Her novelized memoir, Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of my Unmarried Midlife, was released in February 2007. She thinks being single rocks.
Susan Jane Gilman is the author of the bestselling book Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, as well as Kiss My Tiara, from which her essay Marriage Ain’t Prozac is taken. She has written commentary for the New York Times, Ms., US, Real Simple, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, and has won several literary awards for her fiction and essays. Although she is currently living in Geneva, Switzerland, she remains, eternally, a child of New York.
Genevieve Davis Ginsburg was a licensed counselor and author, best known for founding Widowed to Widowed, a Tucson-based advocacy group that went on to help thousands of people survive the death of a spouse. The author of Widow to Widow: Thoughtful, Practical Ideas for Rebuilding Your Life, she was also a recipient of the 1981 Jefferson Award for public service and community leadership and the Arizona Governor’s Award for her social service. She died in 1996, surviving her husband by 21 years.
Michelle Goodman is author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube (Seal Press, 2006). Her writing has appeared in Bark, Bitch, Bust, Salon, and Seattle Times. She lives in Seattle with Buddy, her 80-pound lapdog, and has yet to take down the Nixon-era drapes in her wood-paneled living room. Visit her blog at www.anti9to5guide.com.
Abigail Grotke has been collecting classic advice books for almost twenty years. She has combined selections of advice from her 1,000 plus books with witty commentary to create her award-winning web site, Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice (www.MissAbigail.com) and book, Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating, and Marriage (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). During the day, Grotke is a digital projects coordinator at the Library of Congress. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with her dog Felix and an amazing collection of ice crushers.
Chelsea Handler is an accomplished stand up comic making appearances all across the country. She can be seen regularly on the Oxygen network show Girls Behaving Badly, on the E! Channel as a regular commentator, on The Tonight Show as a Tonight Show correspondent, as well as in many TV guest appearances. Chelsea’s essay, THUNDER, is from her first book, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands, published by Bloomsbury in 2005.
Lynn Harris is author of the forthcoming comic novel Death By Chick Lit, as well as its prequel, Miss Media, and several humorous non-fiction books including Breakup Girl to the Rescue! An award-winning journalist, she writes for Glamour, Salon.com, Nerve.com, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many others. She is co-creator, with Chris Kalb, of the award-winning website BreakupGirl.net. Lynn lives in Brooklyn, where everyone is a “local author.”
Jane Hodges is a Seattle-based journalist and writer. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, and her journalistic work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Seattle Times, Fortune, and other publications. She is addicted to coffee and reads a mean tarot. Her favorite coming-of-age book is Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and she is working on a fiction manuscript involving women, guns, and cars.
Amy Hudock, Ph. D., a single mom, teaches English at a private college preparatory school in South Carolina, where she lives with her daughter. She is the editor-in-chief of LiteraryMama.com and co-editor of Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press, Jan. 2006). Her work has appeared in ePregnancy, Pregnancyandbaby.com, Skirt!, LiteraryMama.com, and other parenting publications..
Sarah Iverson was born in Brenham, Texas, a town famous for ice cream and miniature horses (www.bluebell.com, www.monasteryminiaturehorses.com). She holds a B.A. from Brown University in Comparative Literature. She has worked as a pastry chef, yoga teacher, hedge fund recruiter, sperm lab technician, personal trainer, calculus tutor, and wine importer, and she was a New York City Golden Gloves boxing champion. She writes children’s novels under a different name and has a special interest in mythology. She lives in Brooklyn.
Columnist Judy McGuire has worked a number of very odd jobs in her life, including stints as an auto-parts delivery person, a heroin ethnographer, and managing editor of the well-known stoner journal, High Times. Having long ago cast aside drugs in favor of love, she currently writes “Dategirl,” a sex & love advice column, for the Seattle Weekly. Alternate versions of the column also enjoyed long runs in the New York Press, Men¹s Fitness and the Eugene Weekly. When she’s not writing about herself in the third-person, she’s updating her blog, which can be found at http://badadvice.typepad.com.
Heather McKinnon is an artist at The Seattle Times. Her writing and illustration have appeared in newspapers across the country including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where a version of this essay was originally published. She lives on Vashon Island in Puget Sound with her husband, two cats and four dogs. When’s she’s not picking up poo and cleaning litter boxes, she escapes to her art studio, where she recycles found objects into creepy dioramas. Nothing satisfies her more than chopping off Barbie doll heads with a hacksaw. If you ever visit, don’t look in the freezer.
Wendy Merrill has been conducting undercover operations in the arena of dating and mating for many years, earning her several advanced degrees. Her unique “catch and release” program has provided a rich body of data, and she’s currently compiling her research for a collection of essays entitled, Falling into Manholes. Wendy has an essay in the recent anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age which Publishers Weekly called out as one of the funniest. Wendy the entrepreneur founded WAM Marketing Group, a unique marketing communications company based in Sausalito, California, where she currently lives.
Mikki Morrissette is the author of Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide (Be-Mondo Publishing, Fall 2005 and re-released by Houghton Mifflin, Spring 2007). She speaks about issues and concerns with Choice Mothers in person, through her www.ChoosingSingleMotherhood.com website, and in an online discussion group for Choice Moms.
Under the cover of night, Laurie Notaro ran away from her former home in Phoenix and is now holed up in Eugene, Oregon, a town so nice it took her a remarkable three whole months to build up enough anger to flip someone off in traffic. She loves ghost stories and seeing models cry, and is under the impression that she looks cute in hats (sadly, this is not true). Her essay, The Speech, is taken from her New York Times bestselling first book, The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life.
Rachel Eve Radway is a writer, editor, traveler, and lapsed artist. Other published pieces include “Car Story 2: The Tale of the Missing Gearshift, and Other Adventures of a Later Learner,” available at http://thebluehammer.com/articles/car.html. Rachel has lived and traveled around the world, collecting roommates and stories. She now lives alone in a beautiful apartment that she decorated herself in Sausalito, California, and is planning her next big home projects.
Michal Reed has an MFA in art and critical writing from CalArts. She has taught university classes in writing, art theory, and the history of feminist theory. Most of her writing credits have been art reviews. Currently, she teaches English and art at a rural Californian high school. Without urban social interactions, in addition to occasionally showing her photography, she is able to easily integrate hiking, biking, swimming, skiing and reflection into her daily life — though of course not all at the same time. She has just finished a memoir about climbing all of California’s mountains that are over fourteen thousand feet and has begun a new writing and photo project about walking.
Jillian Robinson is an award-winning television producer, whose programs have aired on PBS, The Discovery Channel, and in over 45 countries worldwide. Jillian, who has traveled to 33 countries as well as lived in Italy and England (where she managed a TV-production company), speaks about travel’s power to enrich and change our every day lives. Her essay, Out of Africa, in Karen Blixen’s Footsteps, is an adaptation from her new book, Change Your Life Through Travel.
Dana Rozier will receive her MFA in Writing from Vermont College in January 2007. She is the author of Whatcom County with Kids: Places to Go and Things to Do. Dana lives in Washington State with her two children, Elizabeth and David. After writing the essay that appears in this publication, she has purchased several pair of cute underwear and her life has become a lot more fun.
Rachel Sarah is the author of the recently-released “SINGLE MOM SEEKING: Play Dates, Blind Dates, and Other Dispatches from the Dating World,” (Avalon/Seal Press). She’s also the award-winning romance columnist for San Francisco’s j the Jewish news weekly of northern California. Her writing has appeared in Family Circle, Parenting, Tango, Ms., and Christian Science Monitor. Visit her website at www.singlemomseeking.com.
Suzanne Schlosberg is the author of The Curse of the Singles Table: A True Story of 1001 Nights Without Sex (Warner Books). She married her Streakbreaker, Paul Spencer, and they now live in Bend, Oregon. The Streak isn’t the only feat of endurance Suzanne has managed to parlay into a writing gig. She is the women’s record holder in the Great American Sack Race, a competition that required her to run five miles carrying a 50-pound sack of chicken feed. She chronicled her unexpected victory in Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road (Travelers’ Tales). Suzanne’s latest test of stamina is an infertility streak that has exceeded 700 days. Her most recent book is The Essential Fertility Log (DaCapo Press).
Susan Shapiro is a New York- based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane, and Salon.com. She’s the coeditor of the anthology Food for the Soul, and author of Lighting Up, Secrets of A Fix-Up Fanatic and Five Men Who Broke My Heart, recently optioned for a movie by Paramount Pictures. She teaches writing at New York University, The New School, and Mediabistro.com, and can be visited at her website susanshapiro.net.
April Sinclair is the author of three novels, including the critically-acclaimed bestseller, Coffee Will Make You Black for which she received the Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library as well as the 1994 Book of the Year (Young Adult Fiction category) from The American Library Association. Sinclair has an essay in Single Woman of a Certain Age, edited by Jane Ganahl, and has been a fellow at the Ragdale, MacDowell, Yaddo and Djeressi artist colonies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is working on a collection of personal essays.
Adele Slaughter is a freelance writer and teacher. She has covered environmental and personal health for USAToday.com. She has written for Ms. Magazine, Written By, Modestyle.com and CODE. In 2003, she was awarded a national journalism prize for her coverage of multiple sclerosis. In 1993, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars named her a distinguished teacher. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Slaughter’s book of poems, What the Body Remembers was published by Story Line Press in 1994 and is the co-author of Art That Pays: The Emerging Artist’s Guide to Making a Living (NAACP, 2004).
Margaret Smith is a two-time Emmy award winner for comedy writing, and has won the Funniest Female Stand-Up Comedy Award. She has been a regular guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman and has done guest spots on Oprah, HBO, CNN, and starred on That Eighties Show. A writer for The Ellen Show, she is also the author of What Was I Thinking? How Being a Stand Up Did Nothing to Prepare Me to Become a Single Mother (Crossroad Publishing Company), from which her essay, Donor, Doctor, Desperado, is taken. Margaret lives in Southern California with her sons.
In addition to penning the “Sweet Freak” column for Metro newspaper, Amy Thomas has covered fashion designers, perfumers, chocolatiers, wedding planners and furniture makers for publications such as Lucky, Bust, Time Out New York, The Knot and CITY Magazine. She is the founder of the nontraditional wedding web site, modgirl.com, and the co-author of the upcoming interior design book Convertible Houses. When not indulging her wanderlust, Amy is happy to be home in New York City.
Rachel Toor, assistant professor of creative writing at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, Eastern Washington University, is the author of The Pig and I: How I Learned to Love Men (Almost) As Much As I Love My Pets (Plume) and Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process (St. Martin’s). She has also written for Glamour, Reader’s Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and is a staff writer for Running Times magazine. She runs many, many, many miles and is in love with a hooded rat. Visit her website at www.racheltoor.com
Sociologist E. Kay Trimberger is the author of The New Single Woman (Beacon Press, 2005). Parts of this essay are excerpted from the book. She is an ever single woman and single mother, living in Berkeley, CA. The author of two other scholarly books and numerous academic articles, Trimberger has published, op-ed pieces in The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, In These Times and The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. She is professor emeritus of Women’s & Gender Studies at Sonoma state University, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at U.C., Berkeley. You can access her web site at www.kaytrimberger.com.
Jessica Valenti, 28, is the founder and executive editor of Feministing.com. She has a masters degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and has worked with numerous national and international women’s organizations. Jessica is also a co-founder of the REAL Hot 100, a campaign that aims to change the perception of younger women in the media and the blogger for NARAL Pro-Choice America. Her writing has appeared in Alternet, Salon, Guernica Magazine and The Guardian. Jessica’s book, Full Frontal Feminism, will be available in Spring 2007.
M. Susan Wilson was born single and has been that way ever since. A Florida native, she made her way in the mid-1990s to Seattle—the city she now calls home—via Madison, Wisconsin, New York City, and Pusan, South Korea, where she spent a year teaching English as a Second Language. A lawyer by training, she’s spent most of her adult life working as an editor and writer. She’s served as managing editor of SPA Magazine, Seattle Magazine, and—the irony abounds—Seattle Bride. When not working, Susan enjoys traveling on the cheap, indulging in marathon sessions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns, and riding horses (she is, albeit tentatively, learning to jump).
