Betsy Robinson
Coming Feb. 10, 2015
New e-book: Material for Character Actors -- all ages and races; click "Monologues" (above) for more information.
For a review of Plan Z by Leslie Kove at a site that offers free books, click here.
If you liked Darleen Dances, read the book it blossomed into.
"One of the funniest books I have read in a long time. ... a fabulous read." —Sixth Sense radio show, KKNW, Seattle 
Girl Stories & Game Plays an anthology of stories and plays
click here to learn more "Diverse, lively, often hilarious" —Chronogram magazine |
Biography
Betsy Robinson was raised an atheist and went on to make her living as a writer and editor of spiritual subject matter: as managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine for six and a half years and as an editor of spiritual psychology and books about shamans and traditional healers. She attended a four-year healing school (energy medicine) and has been a columnist for UPI’s Religion & Spirituality Forum, but she still isn’t sure what she believes. … And that’s okay. While she’s figuring it out, she writes stories.
Her first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, was published by Mid-List Press in 2001 as winner of their First Novel Award Series. Her second novel, Cats on a Pole, is circulating to publishers. Her third novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg won Black Lawrence Press's 2013 Big Moose Prize and was published in September 2014. And waiting in the wings is her edit of her late mother, Edna Robinson's, novel, The Trouble with the Truth (more about this in a moment). For over a decade Betsy was an actor (Return of the Secaucus Seven; Lianna; and assorted fools, clowns, and sexy wenches all over Off-off Broadway). She is also a playwright, and her scripts have been produced at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Theatre in the Works (Amherst, MA), in Los Angeles, Off-off Broadway, on cable TV, and in Iowa where she won first prize in the Dubuque Fine Arts 1-Act Contest. A Bennington College and National Theater Institute graduate, Betsy is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre where she's had many workshop productions and performed her one-woman 1-act, Darleen Dances (excerpt published in Moving Parts, Viking Penguin 1992, complete play published in Girl Stories & Game Plays). Other published fiction: "The Shanglers," New Plays by Women; “The Last Available Burial Ground on Manhattan Island,” At Rise magazine; "Pose Please," Silo magazine (1993); “May 4, 1970,” Viet Nam War Generation Journal (Dec. 2002) and included in Girl Stories & Game Plays (see links, right); “Jakey, Get Out of the Buggy,” Chronogram (Feb. 2003) and included in Girl Stories & Game Plays (see links, right), "The Hearing," Epiphany (spring 2005) and included in Monologues, Sketches, Scenes, Short Plays e-book (see "Monologues" page on toolbar, above). Articles: Rewire Me, Trop magazine, Spirituality & Health, Parabola, New Renaissance, Guideposts, Conscious Choice, Houseplant Magazine, Indoor & Patio Gardening, GreenPrints, The American Gardener, Cat Fancy, Dog Fancy, and DogGone. Columnist for UPI's Religion & Spirituality Forum. With her aforementioned late mother and screenwriting partner, Edna Robinson, Betsy was awarded a 1987/88 Writers Guild East fellowship to write two movies, The Love Convention and Ms. Manhattan (both unproduced). But the writing partnership continues post-death: Betsy's edit of Edna's 1957 novel The Trouble with the Truth will be published in February 2015 by Simon & Schuster/Infinite Words. (Presale copies are now available on amazon.com.) Betsy has had an eclectic career. She served as an editor and promotional consultant to the Ringing Rocks Foundation on their Profiles of Healing book/digital recording series; she was a publishing associate at Parabola (magazine and books); and she is currently freelancing as a writer/editor/book doctor (see Editing Services), and has had many other jobs ... other lives ... in no particular order: apprentice film editor and projectionist; tutor; art bookstore clerk & picture framer; label typist; reader for the blind; notary public; artist's model for one naked year; paralegal at a record company; traveling houseplant caretaker; janitor; legal secretary; messenger; chambermaid at a Holiday Inn in Lake Placid, NY (don't ever stay there!); advertising, PR, and TV comedy (a show about ducks) writer; dogwalker; Family Court and Transit Authority transcriptionist; fortune cookie writer for Goldberg's Funny Fortune Cookies; hostess at the International House of Pancakes. ... Phew Current Areas of Interest, Passion, and Enthusiastic Curiosity  Deep Metaphors (708.7KB) And if that didn't do it, here's one of my favorite articles I've ever written--about another mode to finding peace in our tumultuous culture. |
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Waiting in the wings for its debut in 2015 is my mother/writing partner's magnificent unpublished 1957 novel (unpublished because Harper & Row dropped their option after To Kill a Mockingbird claimed the full territory of novels by authors born in the twenties about single fathers with peculiar children set in the thirties). Stay tuned for publication news, but for an excerpt right now, check the