Lynn C. Miller

Alex Ross, a thirty-year-old psychologist, enjoys the benefits of a close-knit family: her mother and aunt are twins married to two close friends, and Alex and her cousins, Rolf and Stephen, grew up as if they were siblings. When Rolf is killed in a car accident, Alex’s entire family spins into grief and chaos. Nathaniel, a mysterious art museum curator, soon enters their lives and seems to offer the family solace. Frannie, Rolf’s mother, becomes infatuated with the young man; Alex, who split with her long-term girlfriend in the aftermath of Rolf’s death, finds herself deeply attracted to him. Only Stephen mistrusts Nathaniel—but he soon becomes consumed with the nationwide financial crisis threatening the family’s stability. Will Alex choose Nathaniel over her loyalty to Stephen? Torn between competing desires, fueled by her lifelong but unexamined love of Rolf, she must turn her own training as a psychologist on herself in order to find peace amid the turmoil all around.

The characters—young and old, queer and straight, contemporary and historical—who inhabit Lynn C. Miller’s stories often find themselves in defining moments and crisis situations. As they search through the archives of memory, truth, and experience, they seek to understand not only the past and present but themselves. Stretching the definition of “archive,” Miller builds interconnected webs that surprise, much like the seemingly random papers collected in a box of materials. Fraught relationships, mistaken identities, mysterious disappearances, and the search for love play out in these stories. Friendships are celebrated, ex-husbands cross the line, and Gertrude Stein attempts to write her memoir. An unusual collection that proves greater than the sum of its parts, The Lost Archive will haunt readers with the intensity of its vision.

Best friends Bettina, Miriam, and Fiona are shocked when their dean of liberal studies dies in a single-car accident amid accusations of mishandling university funds. They suspect murder, especially after learning that the dean's estranged wife will inherit three million dollars. Events take a surprising turn when they travel from Austin, Texas, to a Chautauqua performance in Silver City, New Mexico, where they join several others, some with questionable motives, including the dean's wife and her lover. In the close confines of the lodge, the group brings to life remarkable women from history - including Victoria Woodhull, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Virginia Woolf. But when one woman is kidnapped and another disappears, the friends' lives are forever changed as they realize that the masks we wear often hide chilling truths.

After a minor car accident shatters her equilibrium, forty-three-year-old Amanda Ferguson wakes up to a memory of being terrorized by her older brother Adrian, whom she holds responsible for the death of her twin brother thirty years before. Their mother, Eva, blinded by devotion to her eldest son, has locked the truth inside her now-failing memory.When a client from work invites Amanda to a performance of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, a haunting series of events related to the play resurfaces, including the suicide of Amanda’s college lover and mentor, Sarah Moore. As Amanda puts her fractured life back together, the present increasingly echoes her traumatic past, propelling her toward the truth about Duncan’s and Sarah’s deaths––and toward Adrian. Set against the background of the theater, The Day after Death explores how loss and family trauma affect our ability to connect, trust, and love.

Every person has a story to tell, but few beginners know how to uncover their story's narrative potential. And despite a growing interest among students and creative writers, few guides to the genre of memoirs and creative nonfiction highlight compelling storytelling strategies. Addressing that gap, authors Lynn C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook have provided a compact, accessible guide to memoir writing that shows how an aspiring memoir writer can use storytelling tools and tactics borrowed from fiction to weave personal experiences into the shape of a story.Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir offers an overview of the building blocks of memoir writing. Individual chapters focus on key issues and challenges, such as the balance between the remembering narrator and the experiencing narrator, the capacity to honour the subjective voice, the occasion of telling (why does this narrator tell this story now?), creating an organically functional structure for a particular story, and taking the next steps with a written memoir. Drawing on their combined years of experience teaching memoir writing, authoring works of fiction and nonfiction, and working in autobiographical performance, Miller and Lenard-Cook provide a practical guide whose core philosophy is motivated by a key word: story.

In ""Death of a Department Chair"", protagonist Miriam Held recounts the events of the previous fall when she was suspected of killing Isabel Vittorio, the chair of her department and her former lover. The controversial and contrary Vittorio was, at the time of her death, attempting to block the hire of a brilliant African American female professor. Already under siege for her attempts to increase diversity on campus, Miriam is forced to defend her reputation and her life. As she searches for the truth, Miriam amasses evidence that leaves few friends and colleagues free from suspicion. Both a classic whodunit and a witty satire, ""Death of a Department Chair"" dramatizes how communities can create the very climate of mistrust and paranoia that victimizes them.

In this first novel of delicious wit and sharp observation, Austin playwright and professor Lynn C. Miller displays an unerring eye for the foibles of male-dominated departmental politics at fictional Austin University. When Fiona Hardison, a blocked Edith Wharton scholar, is passed over for promotion at the behest of her lover_memorably slimy departmental chairman Sigmund Froelich_she embarks on a journey toward self discovery with surprising consequences. Aided by insights provided in a perceptive Tarot reading, Fiona finds herself reevaluating her academic focus, her personal relationships, and her future prospects for happiness. As she examines her life, she discovers unexpected parallels with Edith Wharton's personal development. These present her with a fresh approach to her biography of this great American author, excerpts of which are interspersed throughout. With sure satiric pacing and much good humor, The Fool's Journey immerses us in a academic atmosphere rife with devious plots. Miller skewers pretensions with a certain hand while she portrays a memorable cast of supporting characters: goddess-y Bettina, wife of botanist Marvin, beloved by all sexes; Dean Darryl Hansen, lover to Fiona and Bettina; solid and supportive fellow Wharton enthusiast Miriam Held; and outrageous gad-fly Blake Burnois, whose mischievous publication of Fiona's biting satire in the Chronicle of Higher Education shatters everyone's status quo into tiny shards. Lovers of the work of Edith Wharton will take particular pleasure from the interweaving of her journey with that of the protagonist in this lively and entertaining tale.