In *Money Is Weird: A Workbook To Help You Build Awareness, Get Curious, & Feel Better About Money*, financial life strategist Lev Mandel presents a practical personal finance workbook that addresses the emotional and behavioral factors that influence our financial decisions. Rather than focusing on conventional areas of personal finance, such as budgeting, savings, and investing, Mandel's book encourages readers to dig deeper into their relationship with money and examine why they respond to it in certain ways. He emphasizes that for those working through the book, it's okay to skip questions and come back to them when the answers come to mind. Ultimately, the goal of the workbook is to provide readers with the tools they need to make positive changes as they move forward on their financial journey. In terms of why he chose to explore this side of personal finance, he explained, "...one of the things I was doing a lot being a financial advisor, was kind of looking and talking through financial anxiety... I think what was missing was these underlying feelings under the numbers, and I think, as the client work really became more and more focused on understanding how it impacts our financial behavior and just life, I really started to go deeper into how we deal with these feelings and looking at how we might be able to respond better to them so that we can make really important financial decisions. I think it's important to know that when we're feeling fogged up, when we're feeling threatened... it's really hard to make decisions about the future... and so I think starting and working at that ground work of under covering this anxiety or these feelings around money really was something that one, I think I kept seeing more and more, and two, I really enjoyed exploring."

In his book, Mandel coins a new word: "wealthness." For him, wealth is about more than just money — it's a combination of two things that aren't typically associated with money at all. "What I thought was really interesting is that the word wealth... really, at the core of it is... it is well-being and health... and it's been associated with money and now we think of it as wealth management, as money management... but I think really that the core idea is how do you use money so that it gives you the best chance of being well, both physically and mentally, and being healthy and getting to live the life you want to live... We've changed its meaning before and we can change it again, and so I think a lot of what's going on, particularly in the financial advisor world, and I think is really interesting is what does the world wealth mean? What is wealth, right? It's a really interesting question, and I like 'wealthness.' I like focusing on being well and being healthy and certainly being intentional and aware."

Best-selling author of historical fiction Pam Webber joins Writer's Voices to discuss her latest novel, *Massawa: A Tale of Illusion, Espionage, and Love*. Set in Massawa, Eritrea, on Africa's Red Sea coast during World War II, the story centers around Kit Thomas, a novice OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agent, who teams up with British MI6 agent, Mark Williams, to investigate the disappearance of millions of dollars of military payroll funds. What they discover is a secret plan by Nazi sympathizers to destroy the only Allied naval base located along the Red Sea. Regarding how women like Kit were able to serve as OSS agents during the war, Webber notes that the OSS specifically recruited women during WII to work in intelligence roles. "Women have always been spies for their homelands for centuries, but it's never been in an organized fashion... Well, in 1942 is when the OSS got started and... the first director of the OSS was a guy named Bill Donovan...a.k.a Wild Bill, and he got that reputation for two reasons. Number one, he was fearless... but he was a notorious womanizer and he knew that women were a natural emetic for men's secrets. So he actively recruited women... and the MI6 from Britain was helping the U.S. get the OSS started... they had OSS camps hidden in the national parks and they were sending these people to these camps for training, including women. Donovan sent women everywhere... He had, obviously, a large contingency in Europe, but he had them in North Africa, he had them in the Middle East, he had them in the Far East... He wanted eyes and ears everywhere, so that was my impetus for Kit."

In terms of her writing process, Webber explains that she always has the ending in mind before she begins drafting, using it to guide her story and character arcs. She also writes short descriptions of each chapter to determine how many chapters her book will have. As she gathers more information, she's able to expand those descriptions into two or three pages of detailed chapter outlines. She remarked, "I believe Dave Robbins when he tells me if the infrastructure of your novel is solid, the story's going to be solid, so I try to make sure that that infrastructure is set and ready to go." As far as future books in the series, Webber says she has plans to write several more novels following *Massawa*. "I am working on the sequel to this... sometimes the more you uncover the more there is to talk about, and that happened with this... until my brother told me about the Miracle of Massawa, I'd never even heard of it and had to look up Eritrea... So, I think there's lots of potential here. I have, kind of, mapped out three in this series, possibly more depending on what I uncover as I do the research for the next book."

In *The Reel Life of Zara Kegg*, novelist Brad Barkley tells the story of 16-year-old Zara Kegg who is still grieving the loss of her mother three years after her death. Her dad decides to move them back to his hometown of Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where she gets a job as a projectionist at an old, rundown moviehouse called Palace Theatre. For Zara, the projection booth becomes a refuge where she can hide out and view the world quietly through 1950s and '60s sci-fi and horror films. She soon meets an oddly dressed boy named Zachary whom she nicknames Mr. Inconsistent, and the more time they spend together, the closer they become. Barkley continues, "...but things with Zachary don't quite add up. His behavior is a little erratic, his stories don't quite make sense, and she has to figure out what's going on with him as she's also figuring out whether this is someone to trust, sort of, her reentry point into real life again." With regard to his protagonist, Barkley admits he doesn't know how he came up with her distinctive name. "Character names always either just pop into your head or you struggle and you have to find a name, and you try out twenty of them and none of them sound right. So this is one of those that just popped into my head and I knew right away it was right."

When it comes to his writing process, Barkley explains that he doesn't plan out his stories or begin with an outline. As a pantser, he enjoys writing the story as it comes to mind. "...writing is a process of discovery. You find out what the book is about, you find out who's important to Zara... and I think the best writing comes from your subconscious mind, so I feel like I don't need to plan what's going to happen any more than I plan what I'm going to dream at night. My dreams are always way more interesting than anything I can make up, so I just trust that part of my brain to tell the story and my job is get out of the way. I always like to say, I'm the designated typist. That's my job."

In *What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption,* creative and freelance writer Paige Towers tells the story of the Sueppel family and explores how their tragedy connects to the larger history of intercountry adoption in South Korea. Back in 2007, Steven Sueppel was the vice president of Hills Bank and Trust in Iowa City. In the fall of that year, it was revealed that he had allegedly embezzled more than half a million dollars from the bank, and was facing the possibility of a long prison sentence for his crimes. At the time, Steven was living with his wife, Sheryl, and their four adopted children from South Korea. Overwhelmed by the intense financial pressure, Steven murdered Sheryl and their children before taking his own life. Following the tragedy, Holt International, one of the largest international adoption agencies in the world, was mentioned as the agency through which the Sueppels adopted their children. With regard to why she chose such a heavy subject to write about, Towers recalled that the idea came to her after graduating from college, when she moved to South Korea to teach English. "...I found it odd that such a modern, economically booming country was still sending children overseas for adoption... because really, it was the first country where intercountry, overseas adoption, really exploded. Not only was it the largest sending country in the world, but it later became the model for which the Holt Agency and others applied this model to other countries, and so I found it to be an interesting case study and I wrote the book."

Rather than writing separate books on each topic, Towers explains why she chose to weave together the story of the Sueppels with the history of South Korea's adoption practices. "I felt really personally connected to the case... and I wanted to link those stories back to... the larger history of Korean adoption… it's such a complex, overwhelming socio-geopolitical thing that I felt that it was less intimidating for me as a writer to find this personal connection and to hold on to it and allow readers to hopefully feel a connection with this eastern Iowa family... it was important to me to tell these children's stories and not to condemn adoption or condemn adoptive families, but to try to unravel the complex mainstream narrative behind the act."

In *Death of the Soccer God*, novelist and former advisor to the United Nations Dimitry Elias Léger presents his second novel that centers around a talented Haitian soccer player named Gilbert "Gil" Chevalier who leaves his country to study at Columbia University in New York City. While playing soccer in Central Park, Gil catches the eye of a U.S. National Team's coach, who recruits him to play for the United States at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. From there, his fame in the sport skyrockets, and as a result, his life changes dramatically. Regarding the novel's setting, Léger explains that he chose this particular time period because of a remarkable true event. "In 1950, the U.S. men's soccer team beat England in the opening game of the World Cup in Brazil and... the guy who scored the goal for America to beat England was a Haitian immigrant... He was a kid like me who grew up in Haiti and... came to New York to study and the next thing you know, he's playing in the World Cup and on top of the world, and then has to go back home and deal with the complications of being... a world famous celebrity... and when I read about him I thought... How do you square your roots when you become a global star?"

As readers may have noticed, Léger has a unique style of writing that switches from first person to third person perspectives throughout the novel, sometimes within the same page. He notes that he uses this technique to reflect the natural changes of human thought. "I'm trying to mimic our inner monologues. I like to think on any given moment we're thinking about our relationship with heaven and hell. We're thinking about our sins and our good qualities, and we're thinking about doing the laundry. We're thinking about grocery shopping and then we're scared about our kids, we're scared about our grandkids, we're worried about our parents... the fear, the love, that kind of drive us on a daily." In addition to the shifts in perspectives, Léger also incorporates different languages throughout his book. He explains that he does this to fully immerse readers in the story. "Reading my books, I think, are an opportunity to discover new languages and to discover new cultures. It's a way to travel basically around the world from the safety of your Kindle and on your book."

In *The Many Lives of Anne Frank*, book critic and former editor at *The New Republic*, Ruth Frank takes readers into Anne Frank's life from her childhood to her time in the concentration camps, and also explores the story behind the creation of her famous diary. What many may not realize is that there were actually three versions of the diary: the original version, which was her rough draft, the second version which included her edits, and the final version, which is the world-renowned published biography that has been read by millions around the world. Interestingly, the published version of her diary includes information that Anne had previously removed as she was revising the manuscript, but her father replaced after Anne's death. As for what was initially excluded, Franklin notes, "For one thing, she took out some direct references to the family's Jewish practice while they were in hiding... but the major thing that she took out is her romance with Peter van Pels, the son of the van Pels', the family with whom the Franks were in hiding for all that time, and of course Anne did not explain why she made these choices... and in general, I don't like to speculate as a biographer about things for which we have no factual evidence..."

Reflecting on what might have happened to the diary if Anne had survived, Franklin speculates that she would've published a work that was entirely different than what she started with. "...the diary would've almost certainly not have been published in the form that we know it now... and what I picture, in fact, is that if she had survived, she might've written a really indelible memoir of the concentration camps that would enable us in some ways to see them differently because just about every famous book that has come out of the Holocaust is by a man... and one thing I go into in the book is how the experience for women especially in Auschwitz was a little bit different from the experience of men... and I think if Anne had lived, she might've written a book that would've resulted in us seeing the camp a little bit different."

In *A Different Kind of Vow: Rewriting My Happily Ever After*, counselor, journalist, and debut memoirist Laurie Collister shares her first memoir about her colorful life in Los Angeles in the 1980's. Although Collister moved to California at age 21, her memoir focuses solely on her experiences in her thirties and forties. Based on her own diaries that survived a condo fire, Collister chronicles the many unusual events that occurred on a regular basis as she was figuring out her life and searching for the right partner. She recalled, "Every single month something odd happened to me, which I recorded in my diary, and whether it'd be working at a convent or talking to an obscene phone caller every night... everything was odd, so that's why it lends itself to a book... [it was] also a spiritual quest too. So the arc of change really was finding the vow, failing to find the vow, and then discovering that maybe there's a different vow to follow, so that was the arc of change in this memoir. There was a lot of angst around that, time was running out, I needed to find the guy and all these odd men showed up, and so that's where the character development occurs."

Unlike many memoirs, which are written from memory, *A Different Kind of Vow* draws directly from Collister's diary entries. "Every material is from... my diaries. There's nothing that's made up or based on my memories. It's all carefully pulled from diary entries. There's nothing that's sort of, oh I think that's what happened." And because diary writing is so important to her, she now writes her thoughts in a specific type of journal called a Leuchtturm, which is produced in a 100 year-old company outside of Germany. Out of her 300 diaries, would she ever let anyone read what she's written? "Never... no one could read it anyway because my writing's so illegible. That's the lock and key of my diary. It's completely illegible... I have to say that some words are incomprehensible, but, fortunately, enough are comprehensible that I can make out what I said."

In *Enormous Wings*, *New York Times* bestselling author Laurie Frankel introduces readers to Pepper Mills, a 77 year-old grandmother who reluctantly moves into a retirement community at the request of her adult children. While there, she makes new friends and falls in love, but then becomes ill. She worries she may have a serious medical condition, but soon discovers she's not sick at all - she's pregnant! Regarding the inspiration for this unusual story, Frankel explained that the idea came to her years ago following a health issue involving her grandmother. "...when my grandma first got sick two and a half decades ago with what we later learned was lung cancer, at the beginning... she was kind of nauseous and kind of confused, and kind of muddled and fuzzy-headed, and she and I were joking at the time that maybe she was pregnant... clearly that seed lay dormant for a really long time and many decades later I wrote this book."

Known for writing about controversial topics such as abortion and transgender identity, Frankel noted that a novel's length allows important issues like these to be fully addressed. "I feel like I don't set out to write about these controversial subjects, but somehow they come up and it is true that at that point I do not shy away from them... This is what novels suit up for is this ability to have conversation when conversation is difficult... a novel is ten hours of time, it's three hundred pages, it's character-driven, it's funny, it's real people in real relationships and so it allows you to get in and muck about in these issues and talk about what there is to talk about... and in some ways it's the contract that you have with the reader... it's engaging with, it's having a conversation with and gosh, I just sort of think that's what the world needs now is conversation."

In *Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable*, journalist and author Danielle Crittenden presents her poignant memoir about the devastating loss of her daughter, Miranda, and her journey through grief that followed after. Rather than encouraging readers to move on after loss, she writes about sitting with the grief and living with the immense pain that it brings. As difficult as it was to write about Miranda's death, Crittenden explained why she felt compelled to share her experiences in this memoir. "It was one thing to write the book, but then it's another thing to talk about and promote the book... In fact, I find, actually, the more I talk about it the closer I feel to my daughter, so in a way that helps me... I needed to write about what I was feeling - not as a journal, not as something personal, but as a reporter. I felt... when this kind of tragedy strikes, that you are just flung into what I call now the alternative universe, and I felt... I needed to communicate what I was going through... both [my husband] and I have lost parents, but it is a completely different type of grief when you lose your own child."

As Crittenden was navigating her grief journey, she found little comfort in the books intended to help readers cope with loss. Though some books encouraged acceptance after losing a loved one, she struggled to accept that her child was gone. "...all the grief books that I was coming across were like book versions of people trying to comfort you and tell you how it's going to go... I realized with the loss of a child, no I'm never going to accept this. I will resign myself to it, but I'm not going to reach a place where I think... oh yeah, I accept Miranda dying tragically and suddenly and missed her whole rest of her life... So, I wanted to graphically describe what it was really like... everything reminds you of them. It's the chair that she sat in, the bed that she slept in, the paths that we walked, the music that we listened to, it's all around you every second of every day..."

In *Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business,* co-founder and CEO of fassforward, Gavin McMahon offers an insightful guide on how businesses can use storytelling as a powerful tool to drive successful leadership and communication. Rather than focusing simply on data, McMahon shows how stories can captivate and draw people in and serve as the foundation that shapes and strengthens the culture within a business. When asked how he became involved in business storytelling, he explained, "Over the years I realized that people are always involved in something and so, in the course of our work, it's really been about moving people and getting people to see themselves in the picture wherever they're going, and storytelling really is a fundamental tool to get that done... business has always had people... it's been around for a long time. I think it's enjoying a moment right now, possibly in reaction to AI. People are reaching for what makes us human and storytelling makes us human..."

Reflecting on why storytelling is so effective, McMahon explains it's because humans have a natural tendency to place themselves within the narrative. "...that's a big part of why stories work because they're very much associated with us. Somehow we have a relationship with our story so... by putting you in the center and your brain doing the work of making it real, you really transport yourself and that's why stories are so much stickier." And in regards to the impact AI may have on the future of storytelling, he remarked, "... [AI] won't improve things. Humans are the people that improve things, and so a human and AI can probably write a better story... on the other hand... if you look at the trajectory of what AI is able to do, it does get closer and closer every month or six months, it seems, to writing a better story..."