I got a chance to speak to our 2019 alum, Joanne Morgyn White, who writes at J. Morgyn White, and was so impressed by how prolific and tenacious she is! We talked about the many books she’s written (17!) and how after signing with an agent and going out on submission, she decided to self-publish. Fans of Dungeons & Dragons as well as Magic: The Gathering, will be particularly interested in Joanne’s role in helping price the cards when the collectibles were first created!

​J. Morgyn White​ is the author of Too Cursed to Kiss and the forthcoming Demons for Breakfast. She is the award-winning founder of SCRYE Magazine and former editor of Fork & Bottle, where she specialized in artisan cheese and biodynamic wines—two passions that sometimes sneak into her fiction. Her stories have earned recognition from the Daphne du Maurier and Olive Woolley Burt Awards, multiple Claymore finals, and in 2023 she was named Best New Writer at Futurescapes. She’s a proud alumna of the Northern California Writers’ Retreat and a member of WFWA, HWA, ITW, and HNS. When she’s not plotting monsters or rewriting time, she can be found treasure-hunting vintage jewelry, nurturing heirloom vegetables, or testing obscure indie perfumes that smell like witch’s forest walks and forgotten libraries.

White lives in Northern California wine country with her game-designing husband, their son, and two mischievous Bengal cats. She’s always hunting dragons—and writing the kind of stories that kiss like curses and bite like fate.

About Too Cursed To Kiss: Harlan Madson just wanted a quick payday. Instead, the job ends with her ex dead, the murder weapon in her hands, and a poison searing through her veins. Enter Waldemar Forndaur: aggravatingly hot, suspiciously powerful, and unable to touch Harlan without setting off a death curse. He saves her life, then ruins it with a single truth. And now the hunters are coming. Chased by ruthless reality-warping monsters and haunted by secrets, Harlan and Wald must survive long enough to clear her name, reverse the curse, and maybe, finally, figure out what the hell is going on between them. Rewriting time doesn’t just change the future, it rewrites who you are. Dark, romantic, and twisted with shadow-soaked magic, packed with wicked humor, scorching chemistry, and a heroine who claws her way to power one mistake at a time.

​Buy Joanne’s debut on Etsy!​

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Many thanks for reading and listening,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

Sometimes novels are twenty years in the making. For our 2025 alum Elizabeth Kemp, something she witnessed on a cruise decades ago needled in her memory and after years of scribbling ideas on receipts, she sat down to write her novel during the pandemic. Writing can be like that—the writer as observer, taking in the world and seeing the anomalies, wanting to explain them, or explore them!

I was lucky enough to meet Elizabeth at the San Francisco Writers Conference in February 2023, when she booked an 8-minute consultation with me. She followed up from our meeting with the first twenty pages of her manuscript and I was hooked, ready to read more—and help edit it toward publication. In October 2025, her debut novel, Tread Lightly, was published by Sibylline Press. Sibylline is a small press, publishing books exclusively by women over fifty. They take unsolicited manuscripts, so while Elizabeth had reached out to literary agents, she eventually tried this route on her own, and within weeks, Sibylline came back to her with an offer.

We talked about her path to publication in this Book Journey, including getting a blurb from a fellow NCWR alum, Carinn Jade! I hope you enjoy the listen!

Here’s a bit about Tread Lightly from the publisher:

A stay-at-home mom with a past navigates a murder in Silicon Valley...When a lifeguard’s body is found at the local pool where Tierney lap swims daily, she is pulled back into the life she thought she had left behind when she was a member of the Crisis Intervention Squad in Dublin, Ireland. A former hostage negotiator turned stay-at-home mom, her move to Silicon Valley for her husband’s job offered the contrast of a calm, domestic life. But this murder investigation disrupts all that, connecting to an event in her past, and threatening to overwhelm her.On the domestic front, the cliques at her kindergartener’s new private school aren’t making it easy for her to fit in either. This ‘fish out of water’ story is a domestic thriller set amid a backdrop of the tech industry’s 2007 stock-option backdating scandal.As Tierney struggles with survivor’s guilt from her previous employment and wrestles with the motherhood/career balancing act, there’s still a murder to be solved. And in helping solve it, Tierney discovers the assumptions we make about people can be completely incorrect—even when those people are ourselves.

Happy listening, reading, and writing,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat