100 books like Mad Honey

Novelist, poet and scriptwriter. My interest in young narrators stems from a desire to effectively capture the voices of children in my novels. Creative writing PhD studies with the University of South Wales encouraged me to research different strategies and techniques used by published authors and to experiment with them in my writing. The String Games my debut novel was the result of this academic and creative journey. Further novels continue to include young voices in a starring role as I get inside the heads of a range of characters. After a stint as a university lecturer, I dabbled in fiction for children and through a collaboration with illustrator Fiona Zechmeister, Pandemonium a children’s picture book was published in 2020.

I've been a researcher, educator, and practitioner of domestic violence services for over 15 years, and am extremely passionate about this topic. After having worked in the domestic violence field, I then pursued my PhD to study this problem, which I now continue to research and teach about as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Moravian University. In our ever-globalizing world, I believe it's especially important for us to consider domestic violence from a cross-cultural perspective, and having studied this issue in Latin America and among Latina women in the U.S., I hope to spread that knowledge even further. More than ever, it is important for everyone to gain knowledge on this worldwide problem.

I marvel at the resilience, tenacity, and optimism with which survivors and their advocates confront sexual violence. As a scholar of life writing, I find the “me too” movement to offer a fascinating case study of how survivors broke through default narratives of women’s unreliability and “he said/she said” to be heard by a massive global audience. By telling their own stories as “we said,” they tapped into a new collective credibility. Each of my recommended books helps us to understand “me too” as a powerful episode in a long struggle for survivor justice.

I am through and through a storytelling creature and fell in love with books as a child. I first aspired to be a librarian, then an author. Life took me in other directions, and when I found songwriting as a teen, I figured it would be the closest I would ever come to my original dreams. It was not until I escaped from my abusive family as a young adult and dove headfirst into therapy that I realized my story was far darker than I had ever let myself admit. I am now a singer-songwriter and memoirist who believes that sharing our stories with one another will change the world. 

I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I also have my Ph.D. in somatic psychotherapy. In my clinical practice, I noticed how many smart, kind women were trapped in trauma bonds. So, I researched the topic and decided to write a book to help women understand the complex psychological process of trauma bonds and how to recover from coercive control and abuse. Also, my ex-husband is the "Wolf of Wall Street", so I have personal experience of a trauma bond as well.

I love books where the setting is just as big and alive as the characters. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a familiar place or someplace new: if a vivid setting is a key element of the story, I’m in. I think it’s because I grew up in one of those small towns in the beautiful middle of nowhere where if someone asks where you’re from, it’s just easier to say someplace else. I wanted to see the world, and books let me do that. I also wanted validation in reading—and writing—about the small places I knew, and books let me do that, too.  

I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I worked for thirty five years as a psychologist and my late wife, Rosie Larner, was a social worker and lecturer. We have both dealt with cases of domestic abuse and have recognised the extent of the problem worldwide and the misery that it causes. We offer these tales under the pen-name of Rosy Stewart to show the diversity of the problems and to bring hope to the sufferers with the hope of resolution of each case to reach a wider audience.

I always used food to cope with painful feelings, and I developed Binge Eating Disorder as a child. As an adult, I was in therapy to deal with traumatic stuff, and I lost 100 pounds. I finished therapy with a whole new set of tools with which to navigate the world, but I still regained the weight and started hating myself again. I said, “Whoa. Time-out. I am worthy of love. That has not changed, so why do I hate myself again?” That is what I explore in Big Fat Disaster: what is our worth, and why should that worth depend on what we look like? 

I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I worked for thirty five years as a psychologist and my late wife, Rosie Larner, was a social worker and lecturer. We have both dealt with cases of domestic abuse and have recognised the extent of the problem worldwide and the misery that it causes. We offer these tales under the pen-name of Rosy Stewart to show the diversity of the problems and to bring hope to the sufferers with the hope of resolution of each case to reach a wider audience.

As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.