Blogs

Beyond laughter and learning, the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop helps spark creative collaborations, inspiring writers to work together to share their funny and heartwarming words with the world.

Prolific author Gina Barreca, who’s keynoted and served on the faculty at the workshop, tapped into the brilliance of celebrated women authors and the EBWW writing community for a new book, Fast Funny Women: 75 Essays of Flash Nonfiction. It will be published by Woodhall Press on March 2, but is available now for pre-orders.

Barreca, a humorist and professor of English literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, invited 75 women writers, ages 20 to 89, “to make a party out of their life’s most unnerving, challenging, illuminating, desperate and hilarious moments” in a collection of new works.

The storytellers include “political campaigners, devoted teachers, lousy daughters, good mothers, would-be nuns, admired sportswriters, grad-school-wanna-bes, revenge-driven sisters, frustrated roommates, body-fluid-sorting professionals, lace-loving fashion mavens, intrepid daters, hungry lovers, justice-seeking nasty-women, ACE wedding celebrants, trapped wives and women with all kinds of ammunition." 

The essayists feature three former EBWW keynoters — Ilene (Gingy) Beckerman, author of Love, Loss and What I Wore; New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly; and stand-up comic Leighann Lord — as well as “conference-star regulars like Mandy Smith Brasher, Kari Collins, Bonnie Jean Feldkamp and Amy Hartl Sherman who wrote short, brilliant, groundbreaking essays for the anthology,” Barreca said.

New York Times’ bestselling novelist Marge Piercy, Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley, “Sylvia” creator Nicole Hollander, English author and essayist Fay Weldon and cartoonist Mimi Pond also contributed short, funny pieces.

Barreca, who’s already planning a 2022 sequel, Fast Fierce Women, described the book as “perfect for students of writing, writers of humor and all readers who welcome laughter, insight and perspective into their lives.”

This is the latest collaborative project that has emerged from connections writers have made through the biennial workshop.

In 2018, the workshop collaborated with author Allia Zobel Nolan on Laugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Celebrate Then and Now … Before We Forget, a nostalgic, amusing look at life through the ages that was named one of the best indie humor books of 2019 by Independent Book Publishing Professionals. The workshop is currently exploring publishing a book of essays featuring the winners of Nickie’s Prize for Humor Writing.