This is one of my favorite photographs of Kaira. She’s beautiful (inside and out), and she is one smart and powerful cookie! Kaira, who started Central Ohio’s first homeless shelter for families in the early 1990s, is also the brains behind her successful business REAL YOU and the author of two books: Real You, Incorporated, and her brand new debut novel, Here, Home, Hope which launches on May 1st.

The publishing of her novel is a dream come true for Kaira —a dream that took lots of hard work, dedication, and the support of her family and girlfriends. Here, Home, Hope is a charming, witty, and upbeat story that explores the many facets of courage it takes to reinvent life and reach for something larger than ourselves. To celebrate the launch of her novel, I asked Kaira if she’d be my guest here on Brava, and I’m so glad that she accepted my invitation!

So please welcome Kaira Rouda as she shares what it’s been like to realize her dream …

Here, Home, Hope

Look to your left here on this blog, at the categories Beth Hoffman deems important in her life: friends, giving others credit, celebrating success, telling stories. Then, look to the right and you’ll see a periwinkle hydrangea – central to my debut novel’s imagery – and one of my favorite flowers. From the moment we met on Twitter – Beth and I had an instant connection. When she asked me to write a guest post for this amazing Brava space, I was humbled. I can only dream my debut novel has a smidgen of the power CeeCee Honeycutt has had to inspire readers.

To spark dialog.

To resonate.

That’s the truest and most rewarding part of writing. If your words are able to inspire, or to create action in someone’s life, you’ve succeeded. My previously published nonfiction book, Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs (Wiley), has done that, I know, for women entrepreneurs. It makes my day when I receive an email – or the occasional handwritten note – from a reader who has followed her dreams because of my words. Maybe she started her own business, created her first vision board, stood up to her boss, or created a more exciting personal brand after reading my book. That’s humbling. It makes writing and telling stories so worthwhile.

And now, I have reinvented myself. I’m entering the world of women’s fiction. A world so eloquently populated by other amazing authors like Beth whose words reach out of the page and stay with you. What I have found since stepping cautiously into this fabulous fiction world is that it’s a land of women who truly, actually, support each other. My entire career – working in many different industries – has been spent espousing that truth – that together we are stronger. Many times, in those other worlds, women did not stick together at all.

Imagine my joy then, when some of the most amazing women’s fiction writers today welcomed me in.  Beth Hoffman, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Claire Cook, Katrina Kittle, Jenna Blum, Robyn Harding, Talli Roland, and Amy Hatvany.  Each of these women endorsed HERE, HOME, HOPE.

Just typing their names makes me overwhelmed. The gratitude I have is hard to express.  Thank you is not enough, not when their words demonstrate a show of support for the dream I’ve had since 4^th grade: writing a novel. Because of Beth, and these other amazing writers, I don’t feel so alone. Because of them, I believe my debut novel may resonate with readers. Because of them, I’m not entering a new world with friends.

So as I anxiously anticipate the May 1st publication date of HERE, HOME, HOPE, I feel as though I have a circle of women across the country – and the UK – cheering me on. A circle of women who believe in friendship, in celebrating each other’s successes, in telling stories and in resonance.

And that, truly, is what life is all about.

Please visit Kaira Rouda’s website HERE.

You can also find her on Twitter: @KairaRouda and on Facebook

One of the many things I enjoy about writing, is doing the research. Though I always select places and settings that I know intimately well, I like to go back and immerse myself as I write important passages. The story in my new novel segues between two entirely different cultures—farm life in Slade, Kentucky to the world of antiques in Charleston, South Carolina.

So, I’m off to Charleston where I’ll write and think and research; and relax on a porch overlooking a secret garden. And before too long I’ll be visiting  Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, and enjoying the mysteries it holds. But I’ll be back to update my blog … eventually!

Happy Spring, everyone.

Rebecca Rasmussen has a full and busy life that’s about to get much, much busier. She’s a mom, a wife, and she teaches writing and literature at Fontbonne University. On April 12th, Rebecca will celebrate what is certain to be one of the most exciting and memorable days in her career, and perhaps her life—the launch of her debut novel, The Bird Sisters.

To look at Rebecca’s lovely face is to see gentleness and tenacity, which happen to be the predominant qualities in her book’s main characters, Milly and Twiss. Beautifully written, vivid, and sometimes heartbreaking, The Bird Sisters is a story that examines the wounds and fragile complexities of family bonds, loyalty, and love.

In celebration of her novel’s release, I invited Rebecca to be my guest on Brava, and I’m so glad she accepted. So please welcome Rebecca as she shares how the story of The Bird Sisters came to be.

The story of The Bird Sisters belongs to my grandmother Kathryn.

Until I was a young woman, I knew very little about her even though I’d spent a great deal of time with her and had even lived with her at one point. I knew that her father was an extremely talented golfer and her mother was lovely and dark, and that my grandmother thought I looked a little like her. I knew that my grandmother tromped through fields and streams when she was a girl, ruining whatever dress her mother had ironed for her, and that she fell asleep midway through television shows with salt crackers on her lap when she was old. I knew that she lost both of her parents when she was a teenager and that she never quite recovered from that loss. But it wasn’t until after my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, went through the treatments, and went into remission that I got to know her better.

In 2000, she and my mother moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was living at the time, waiting out those last precious months before I went to graduate school. My mother worked a lot. My grandmother and I didn’t. Every morning, we’d go to breakfast together in Old Town, and it was over our first cups of mountain coffee that questions about her history started filtering into my mind and answers started flowing from her lips. She ended up telling me the story of her parents, their heartbreaks and their joys, as though I were a friend instead of her granddaughter. And then one day she showed me a picture of them at a county fair when they were very young. My great-grandfather Bert and my great-grandmother Tracy were standing under a cardboard moon, looking at each other with a kind of uncontained love that was rare for photographs of that time. I kept measuring their expressions against the story my grandmother had told me. I kept wondering: where did that love go?

A few months later, I went off to graduate school. A month after that, my grandmother fell down in a parking lot and discovered, after many painful tests, that she had a brain tumor. After she passed away that fall, my mother sent me her journals, which we never knew she’d kept. I read them and what I found was indeed heartbreaking, but also something else I couldn’t put a name to.

“This year I’d like to forget Christmas,” she wrote in one entry. “I’d like to throw off all the old yokes and start something entirely new.”

I wasn’t truly hooked until I read this one, a list, which was so sweet and true:

“Things I’ve Always Liked, by Kathryn Sturm –” which began with “the scent of cotton drying in the sun, mud on my feet, honeysuckle twirling up porch railings, my mother,” and ended with ”the crinkle of newspaper, the slam of a screen door!”

What struck me most about her list was that she wrote it when she was 72.

Once I found my way out of missing her terribly and into wanting to honor her (eight years, a husband, and a baby later), the first draft of The Bird Sisters took me about seven months to write.

But, oh, the revisions that followed! The heartbreaks. The joys.

The Bird sisters is available at fine bookstores and also as an ebook.

Please visit Rebecca’s website HERE.

You can also find her on Twitter @thebirdsisters and FaceBook.

Over the years my backyard has become a little wildlife sanctuary. From chickadees all the way to red-tailed hawks and even a peregrine falcon, it’s nonstop action. And yes, we occasionally suffer the loss of a pigeon or dove to the hawks.

That’s nature.

It’s gotten to the point that my feeders must be filled two and sometimes three times a day. Last week I asked my husband, “How much sunflower seed do you think we’ve gone through in the past ten years?” and being the math whiz that he is, he took out a piece of paper and calculated the total within a minute.  On average we go through 50 lbs of sunflower a week, a little more in the colder months. So the total is 12 tons.  That’s right, a whopping 12 tons! And each spring when the red-winged blackbirds arrive and sing their magical songs and the downy woodpeckers bring their babies to the suet log, I sigh with happiness. They are all worth it.

No matter what I might be doing or facing, when a red-wing sings I’m reminded that life, in all it’s many stages, is good.

Behind this lovely face and sweet smile is a woman who knows how to grab hold of a dream and never let go. Cathleen Holst is a debut novelist, and her book, Everleigh in NYC takes the genre of chick lit and spins it into a clever, witty, and sassy read that’s loads of fun. Cathleen has learned the meaning of perseverance, and in these hard times that we all are facing in one form or another, her story is a reminder of how important it is that we believe in ourselves.

Though Cathleen has a busy life—wife, mother, and currently working on her next novel—I invited her to be a guest on Brava, and I’m delighted that accepted. So please welcome Cathleen Holst as she shares what it means to never give up.

The Latchkey Novelist

Writing was a secret dream I kept tucked away, determined to let no one outside of my family (which really meant my mother and older sister) know just how much I really loved to write. As odd as it sounds I didn’t fall in love with writing because of a certain story I’d read. I loved the actual act of holding a pen or pencil in my hand and watching my words appear on the paper. As a young girl, I was usually home alone. A lot. So words became my constant companion, and I took to writing stories just to pass the time. But to this day, I can only remember one. It was a story about handpicked flowers for a girl named Amanda. That short story won a pizza party for my senior class in high school. I was the coolest kid in class that day. I also found joy experimenting with my handwriting, and vividly remember my sixth grade teacher’s frustration with my then fascination with the letter ‘J’. Her words to me were, “What’s with you and the letter ‘J’? And why are you writing them like that?” I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders. When written in cursive, I loved the way that letter flowed from my pen. I thought it was the most elegant letter in the alphabet. No surprise that my oldest son’s name is Justin. Though my fascination with the letter ‘J’ has waned, I continued writing.

Fast forward twenty years and I never would have imagined I would be where I am today—writing a blog post for Miss Beth, for instance.

Four and half years ago, I sat down to write with one goal—complete a manuscript. Once that goal was met, I made a new goal—become a published author. Imagine my joy when both goals were met. Time for celebration, right? Not so fast. My road to publication was anything but easy. I had to leap so many hurdles that the United States Olympic team should seriously consider adding me to their list of athletes. Though I certainly have no desire to repeat that particular experience, it did teach me a valuable life lesson, one that I already knew, but will now never forget. Listen to your heart, but follow your gut. And as much of a nightmare as it was, in a way, I’m thankful for it. It’s made me a stronger, happier person, despite the times I felt I had nothing to smile about. I lost a lot of my self esteem during that trying time, but the one thing I refused to lose was my desire to succeed in this industry. I would not allow anyone other than me to have control of my dreams. They’re mine, and mine alone.

It’s been four months since the release of Everleigh in NYC, and several readers have even taken the time to reach out and tell me how much they’ve enjoyed it. To me, that made it all worthwhile. And despite the bumps along the way, I feel like I have succeeded, and it can only go up from here.

Everleigh in NYC is available at fine booksellers.

Please visit Cathleen’s website HERE.

You can also find her on Twitter @cathleenholst and on FaceBook