Reinventing Yourself, Changing Your Destiny – Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith book review

When we claim a moment to be magical, we feel as if that moment transcends our normal experiences, our ingrained rules, and our cultural outcomes. Magic raises us out of skepticism slowly but if it is good enough, we become fervent believers.

Magic realism is a literary term describing how a story is told. The stories are grounded in reality but some characters have "supernatural" or larger-than-life abilities. With magical realism, women can take flight with dewy, velvet wings, fleeing a life that only had one outcome by trying to escape her iron-clad destiny.

Authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera - which was just released as a movie) and Isabel Allende (author of The House of Spirits) and Gina B. Nahai (author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith) are some authors who write magical realism. Gina Nahai's character, Roxanna the Angel, took flight from a generational destiny and from Tehran where a woman's ability to escape her fate is so difficult that she must don silky white wings and leap from a balcony with all the faith that she will land softly in a new place.

"Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith" is a powerful, compelling, and fascinating novel depicting several women's lives, women who refuse to meekly accept the lot they were assigned in life and women who forged a new life for themselves.

These women didn't create their new lives without sacrifice, humiliation, pain, loss, or mistakes, yet they succeeded in reinventing themselves and elevating their human experience beyond the level of survival.

Mercedes the Movie Star used her extreme beauty to control the men who thought they controlled women. Fräulein Claude completely overhauled herself by denying her national heritage and insisting that she was of German noble descent. Alexandra the Cat also claimed a noble birth and presumed all the dignity that comes with such a claim. Roxanna the Angel literally flew away from her destiny until she could no longer avoid past and her choices.

The story is mostly about Roxanna and the effect her choices had on the people she loved, including her daughter Lili. When trying to make sense of her life and understanding her choices, Roxanna told her daughter:

"In the beginning, I tell Lili, there were many choices and I believing I was doomed, let them go to waste."

Even though Roxanna fled, she never believed she could truly escape her destiny and maintain any relationship with her family and friends - they were incompatible. This conviction led her to make devastating, painful choices.

I've heard the voices of many women who feel so trapped that they become convinced that absolute escape is the only solution. Famous female authors like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf are two women who chose death as their reconciliation. Other women are not as extreme but they fight the chasm between who they think they should be and who they believe they are with an exhaustive force.

Do you ever feel like reinventing yourself or simply escaping? How would you do it? What would you be escaping? Is your reinvention completely incongruent with your current life?
I encourage you to read "Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith" (1999) by Gina B. Nahai to see how her characters managed their reinvention.

Gina B. Nahai was born in Iran who later moved to Los Angeles, California. She is also the author of a new book entitled "Caspian Rain," "Sunday's Silence," and "Cry of the Peacock."

--Looking for more? Visit Famiss, women making and discovering their own history

About the author: Allison Frederick is a writer and online marketing educator for other creative women. www.FaMissWomen.com offers free Web 2.0 resources. She is also the author of an upcoming novel, A Portrait of Josephine, an academic-lite thriller. Find out how to receive a free copy of the novel by visiting www.portraitofjosephine.com

Indian Writer Arundhati Roy Reminds Us About an Artist's Role in Society

Arundhati Roy's observation (taken from her book: Power Politics)


"Painters, writers, singers, actors, dancers, filmakers, musicians are meant to fly, to push at the frontiers, to worry the edges of the human imagination, to conjure beauty from the most unexpected things, to find magic in places where others never thought to look."

The Easy Way to Send Out Christmas Cards

I want to share a fun, inexpensive service with you. Jacquie Lawson is an excellent artist and business owner who created a service that offers animated cards that are fun and musical. The service is incredibly affordable. It costs $10 per year and you can send an unlimited number of cards.

She has a wide selection and offers great support. You receive an email when your card is sent and when it is opened. She has several Christmas and winter cards.

I hope you love her wonderful, easy, creative service as much as I do. Click here to access her electronic greeting card website.

Finding Integrity as a Woman

Achieving integrity, made up of public and private acts in sync with a woman’s true self, is life’s journey.

How do we present to others who we truly are? How to we make decisions reinforcing what we believe in? And sometimes we ask: How do we discover who we truly are? Integrity is a representation of an authentic self. It is a consistent display of our beliefs, values, and moral codes. But the path to integrity is littered with diversions and obstacles, making it challenging to truly live in step with ourselves.

First is the task of discovering who we truly want to be as a human being. We must strip away all the layers of other’s expectations, all our own weaknesses and fears, and then take a look at who is left. Do we like what we see? Is the woman who was buried beneath expectations and rules a woman we would like to spend time with?

Authors help us in this discovery processes by leading us through worlds, characters, and situations we might not otherwise meet. How does our integrity fit into a book’s representation of life? Do we agree or disagree with the action taken by the characters? Do we admire the character? Do we wish to emulate the character? Contrasting our own selves with fictional characters can help us discover who we really are. I focus on women writers, whose experience and tone help me define womanhood and whose wisdom or lack thereof help me define my authentic self.

The new book “Women Who Write” by Stefan Bollman explores the influence of femininity on writers. He writes: “Overcoming the traditional image of a woman is no more than the first milestone in a woman author’s struggle for her integrity. The second is to be able to speak openly about her own passions, or in (Virginia) Woolf’s words, to tell the truth about her ‘own experiences as a body.’”*

It is the second struggle Virginia Woolf spoke of, the struggle to speak openly about our own passion, that trips most women. Do you feel you can openly share your opinions and desires? Do you subjugate your own voice to others, maybe even doing it without realizing it? Are you the last to vote on a family decision? Do you find yourself saying “It doesn’t really matter to me” often? Why does it not really matter to you? Is it because you prefer a peaceful resolution to a situation and for some reason you think that contributing your own preference would rattle that peace? Why? Why are the preferences and opinion of our loved ones valuable but ours “not as important”?

When we withhold our own voice, our own opinions, our own preferences, when we fail to openly share them with others and to insist that they carry as much weight as anyone else’s, we fail to remember who we are. We are not the only ones who forget who we are, our loved ones and our co-workers do not know us either. Why? Because we refuse to share ourselves with them. We refuse to live openly and tell the truth about ourselves. We refuse to live with integrity.

* Women Who Write, by Stefan Bollmann, 2007 Merrell Publishers Limited, p.38

About the author: Allison Frederick is a writer and online marketing educator for other creative women. www.FaMissWomen.com offers free Web 2.0 resources. She is also the author of an upcoming novel, A Portrait of Josephine, an academic-lite thriller. Find out how to receive a free copy of the novel by visiting www.portraitofjosephine.com

"A Weekend to Change Your Life" Review

A Weekend to Change Your Life: Find Your Authentic Self After a Lifetime of Being All Things to All People by Joan Anderson, a book review

There is no shortage of literature about the struggles of an empty-nester woman these days.

This non-fiction book plays nicely into that catagory. Even though I am not her target market, I enjoyed the book. It was a sober reminder, leading me to recognize that choices I make each day compound and if I do not make choices to develop my own talents and presever my own interests; I may find that I completely abandoned myself and then struggle to reconnect with my own voice.

Author Joan Anderson hosts workshops for women who struggle with knowing what they want in life because they spent most of their life giving to others. These women gave so much that they didn't have anything left for themselves.

Her method encourages women to escape to a beautiful, inspirational place. There you can be alone with yourself so that you are not tempted to do anything for anyone other than yourself.

In her own words:
"I am as unfinished as the shoreline along the beach, meant to transcend myself again and again."

Looking for more?
Learn about her retreats

Read her books
A Year By The Sea-Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman

A Weekend to Change Your Life: Find Your Authentic Self After a Lifetime of Being All Things to All People

A Walk on the Beach: Tales of Wisdom From an Unconventional Woman

An Unfinished Marriage

About the author: Allison Frederick is a writer and online marketing educator for other creative women. www.FaMissWomen.com offers free Web 2.0 resources. She is also the author of an upcoming novel, A Portrait of Josephine, an academic-lite thriller. Find out how to receive a free copy of the novel by visiting www.portraitofjosephine.com

"You Can Heal Your Life" Book Review

Author Louise L. Hay did not grow up with a "charmed" life. She had a lot to overcome, and she did. She is the author of an international best seller, "You Can Heal Your Life" and the founder of the publishing company, Hay House. Her publishing company handles the writing lives of many people you know including Suze Orman, Deepak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer, just to name a few.



I strongly recommend this book even though it was first written in 1984. Her health book is timeless. It doesn't overwhelm with health jargon and yet it will really cause you to stop and think about how you treat and think about your body. I decided to go through this book one chapter per day. The chapters are short and it is easy to read one a day, even if you have a tight schedule. She presents interesting a model linking specific health problems and our daily thoughts and behaviors.

"Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens."- quote by Louise L. Hay

Louise Hay saves her personal story until the very end of her book. That disappointed me so I am going to tell you about her now. You see, her book is very positive and very empowering. I know that when I am struggling with negative feelings I try to dismiss empowering words because I expect that the person saying them is a super-human. You know the type, skinny, beautiful, rich, problem free… Of course they can be positive, they don’t have problems like I have. They probably have a house cleaner. I clean my house when I have insomnia at two in the morning. But Louise Hay started her life on the wrong foot.

Her parents divorced when she was just eighteen months old. It appears that her father left and her mother decided to leave her with someone else so that she could take an in-house domestic job. Baby Louise cried for three weeks until her surrogate caretakers told her mother to come get her. Children are never too young to be impacted by family problems. By the time she was five, she had an abusive step-father, and little sister, and the 1930’s Depression was beginning.*
She broke free from her awful family life when she was fifteen and at sixteen, she found herself pregnant. Not knowing how to support her child, she gave the baby up for adoption. Struggling to create a life for herself, she later married and was very happy until many years later her husband initiated a divorce. Again, she dusted herself off and became a counselor. She was very happy and successful as she helped people get through their own hard times until she was diagnosed with an incurable cancer.

Any woman who had been through what she had must be a survivor. She wasn’t going to believe the experts when they told her she was going to die. She began to thoroughly explore her past, possibly examine her beliefs originating from her societal stew, and to treat her body with absolute respect.

Today, she is a celebrated pioneer of the "self-help" industry and runs her own publishing company. Her company has published books by authors you may have heard of – Phil McGraw, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Suze Orman. Do you agree that a woman who has risen from such adversity might be able to help us with her book, "You Can Heal Your Life?"

In her book, Louise teaches that repeated patterns show us our needs. Each need is reflected in a habit and each habit is reflected in a belief. She writes about the battles many of us face when we are trying to change something about ourselves but don’t seem to be making any headway.
"How may times have we said, "I won’t ever do that again!"? Then, before the day is up, we have the piece of cake, smoke the cigarettes, say hateful things to the ones we love, and so on. Then we compound the whole problem by angrily saying to ourselves, "Oh, you have no willpower, no discipline. You’re just weak." This only adds to the guilt we carry."**

* You Can Heal Your Life, p. 215
**You Can Heal Your Life, p. 57

Also see the You Can Heal Your Life Affirmation Cards.


About the author: Allison Frederick is a writer and online marketing educator for other creative women. www.FaMissWomen.com offers free Web 2.0 resources. She is also the author of an upcoming novel, A Portrait of Josephine, an academic-lite thriller. Find out how to receive a free copy of the novel by visiting www.portraitofjosephine.com

Christmas is for Bunnies?

If you are looking for a cuddly little Christmas present for a son, daughter, or grandchild, then please consider "Flossy" bunny. These adorable bunnies are made by Denver women who are learning new skills to try and support themselves. They are part of the Denver metro "Empowerment Program" which was started in 1986.

Where to get a Flossy Bunny:

Tattered Cover Bookstores or

The Empowerment Program

Click here to read article "Empowering Women, One Stitch at a Time"


Flossy The Feel Better Bunny is an excellent Christmas Idea - here's to bunnies for Christmas.