Cheryl A. Ossola            

Before the 1920s, the town of Manzanar—which means "apple orchard" in Spanish— was a place of abundance. Founded in 1910 in the high California desert east o...

When I was a kid, we'd visit my grandparents most summers. Their house, a white Victorian in the Italian section of Syracuse, New York, was a place of endles...

The Other Stories is a fun trove of readings and interviews from the not-super-well-known author pool—and yeah, that includes me. Kudos to Ilana Masad for co...

In THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY, Kira turns to her family's past as she tries to understand the bizarre dreams and visions she's having. The first place she looks ...

Secrets. We all have them, if not entire truths then fragments or details. Adults sometimes regard secrets as shameful or embarrassing, but as children or te...

In this excerpt from THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY, the protagonist, Kira, has the second of many "daytime dreams," as she calls them—vivid scenes that she refuses ...

Book blogger Randee Green, author of the Carrie Shatner mystery series, was kind enough to give me a presence on her site. Check out this interview for an ex...

Weddings are fantasies for some people, a little girl’s dream come true, every detail masterminded—the perfect dress, flowers chosen for color and symbolism,...

Do you remember your first love? Not a crush on a kid in elementary school or the fantasy of being with a celebrity, but real love for someone who made you f...

In The Wild Impossibility, a backyard pond, home to koi and watched over by a statue of the Virgin Mary, is a key location for the book’s protagonist, Kira. ...

When does a piece of clothing become a costume? In a sense, clothing is always a costume, because every garment we wear projects an image of who we are. But ...

Place. For me it’s one of the most important—and enjoyable—parts of writing fiction. This is where a writer can let loose with sensory images; tap into a cha...

Most of us, by the time we get to a certain point in life, have sat with a dying loved one, clasping their hand, trying to comprehend what’s happening in the...

When was the last time a sense of freedom made you feel as if you’d reinvented yourself? That’s what happens to 16-year-old Maddalena in my novel, THE WILD I...

This is the third image in the series of illustrations of my novel, THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY. (Note: someone recently asked me if these illustrations are in th...

This is the second image in the series of illustrations of my novel, THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY. It’s a moment from a scene in a neonatal ICU, which is where my ...

To celebrate the upcoming publication of my novel, THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY, I’ve commissioned watercolor sketches of moments in the book. If you follow me on ...