I think I am a self-actualized person. My mom is a therapist and, from the time I could speak, discussing and dissecting feelings were what we did at dinner. I have also spent the better part of my life in therapy. Yet, somehow, it wasn't until six years ago, at the age of 41 that I finally acknowledged my clinical anxiety disorder…

Writing Dark Fiction

When horror isn’t your cup of tea, but a darker story is calling to you, what do you? Author Samantha Greene Woodruff discusses writing dark fiction with compelling characters...

Writing Dark Fiction

There are many things that do not qualify me to be a person who wrote a novel about lobotomy. I’ll start easy: I am not a trained writer. I always loved to write, and I am a voracious reader; but, for most of my adult life, my writing was PowerPoint presentations for media executives. I’m also not a doctor. Nor am I a psychiatrist. Oh, and blood and gore make me squeamish. However,…

1. People may have suspected a connection between the physical brain and emotional behavior as far back as the Stone Age.

Archeological findings from the prehistoric era indicate early healers used craniotomy as a treatment for the ill. By the Renaissance, “trephination” (drilling into the skull) was a well enough recognized practice for painter Hieronymus Bosch to make it the subject of his 1494 painting “Cutting the Stone” (alternately called “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness,”) which shows a man in the middle of a field while his head is being drilled…

Writing is my second act. Almost a decade ago, after I gave up my full-time corporate job to take care of my two young children, I found myself searching for something “of my own” outside of the home. I’ve always liked to write but hadn’t considered a novel until I took a beginner novel workshop at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence. I started writing a contemporary novel about a suburban housewife dissatisfied with her “charmed” life. It wasn’t great…

There is something about a criminal doctor that is especially chilling. We are conditioned to trust them to heal us, to blindly put our faith in them in a way we do with, possibly, no one else. We take pills they prescribe without knowing what they are. We even allow them to render us unconscious and cut us open to make us better. This necessary vulnerability creates a dynamic that, when exploited by the doctor, is both particularly unconscionable and terrifying…

Seriously, Sam? is a column that looks at the lighter side of suburban life. This month, Sam reflects on her fast-paced, always-on-the-go mom life…

I am just days away from the official launch of my debut novel, The Lobotomist’s Wife, and it all feels surreal. Because my book was an Amazon First Reads pick in January, my book has already semi-launched. It has been a wild and emotional first few weeks and I keep intending to write adaily journal about it, but I have been too busy attempting to stay on top of social media, and thank everyone who has been reading already, and trying (and failing) to start work on my second book, and moving the goal where I feel I have reached “success” father away. This last one is especially not good. When I started writing, I did it on a lark. It was a way to stretch myself, use my brain differently…

Samantha Woodruff reads "Good Tidings"