Mary L. Tabor

Books by Mary L. Tabor

Woman Who Never Cooked: Stories (Firs...

by Mary L. Tabor

Mid-List Press, 2006-04.

About Me

Mary L. Tabor's book (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story debuts June 15, 2010. Here's some background: I had been married for twenty-one years when my husband announced, “I need to live alone.” Already grief stricken by the deaths of my mother, sister and then father, the news threw me into a tailspin of impetuous acts, but the good, the bad and the foolish led me on a journey of self-discovery only to eventually fall in love all over again.

After my husband’s shocking (to me anyway) announcement, I escaped to a visiting writer’s job at the University of Missouri-Columbia and kept busy with Internet dating where I met and went out with men, slept with some of them, and discovered what love might actually be. It was my daughter and her husband who suggested that I begin blogging about my life. And so I did. That’s when Kelly Abbott, CEO of 3ones, Inc., an e-book publisher of literary prose and poetry, reads my blog and sees a book in it, which is how (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story came to be.

Here's the formal bio in typical third person (but this is me!): Mary L. Tabor is the author of The Woman Who Never Cooked (Mid-List Press), winner of Mid-List Press’s First Series Award. Tabor’s short stories have won numerous literary awards while her experience spans the worlds of journalism, business, education, fiction and memoir writing. She was a high school English teacher who joined the business world, leaving her corporate job when she was fifty to earn an MFA degree. The author teaches at George Washington University, works with less-privileged populations at the D.C. library on how to get started writing, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She lives in the Penn Quarter in downtown D.C. and is available for interview. More information may be found at http://www.maryltabor.com.

Why do you write?

I write because that process—not of catharsis—but of the creation of something “other” gives my life a fullness that I think only the attempt to create art can do. Whether or not I have succeeded is for others to judge. But I do know that I live life more fully and deeply through the attempt to make art, no matter how flawed the work may be, no matter how long the process.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Nabokov, Joyce, Auden, Kunitz, Bishop, Lawrence among the dead folk. Annie Dillard, Marly Swick, Melanie Rae Thon, Lee K. Abbott (yes, Kelly Abbott's father), Dana Gioia, Wendy Doniger (adore The Bedtrick), Robert Hass, and more: I will add to this list soon. But for now go here where I talk more about my favorite books (scroll down), including an essay on the young and gifted poet Ravi Shankar and Wallace Stevens: http://maryltabor.blogspot.com