Trish MacEnulty

Since mid-2023 I’ve been researching the life of Theda Bara for a novel. A lot of information can be found on the Internet even if does require some serious digging, but most of the material I found  came from a documentary on Youtube called The Woman with the Hungry Eyes and two biographies: Vamp: The…

Most Sundays my stepson, Jack, comes over and either makes breakfast for me and his dad — or we go out for brunch with him and his girlfriend. This Sunday, however, I had some left over shrimp and decided to make shrimp tacos. They were absolutely delicious! But that’s not why I’m writing today. I’m…

One of my greatest inspirations when writing historical fiction is the art of the period. I saw the above painting by Edward Middleton Manigault, titled “Adagio,” in the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. When I was teaching college in Charlotte, I had students who had never been to an art museum before. So every semester…

My brother David has always been a hero. If he witnesses a purse snatching, he’ll chase the perpetrator down to get a stranger’s belongings back. He saved me more than once from my own self-destructive tendencies when I was young. For years he helped kids from the Bronx become chess champions — going as far…

Thanks to Mattie, my grandfather’s second wife, I spent my childhood as a small adult. Mattie had spirited me away from my alcoholic mother before I was two years old. The story Miz Johnny told me was that Carmella (my mother) was living in a two-bedroom trailer on the outskirts of town when Mattie stopped…

Usually when I talk about voice, I am talking about the “voice” in the writing — the tone, the cadence, the language. But when it comes to audiobooks, there really is nothing more important than the actual voice that comes out of an actual throat. (I will not be listening to AI narrations anytime soon…

In the year 2001 my first novel (under the name Pat MacEnulty) was published by Serpent’s Tail Press. It was called Sweet Fire, after the song by Joni Mitchell about drug addiction. The book got great reviews such as this one from The Guardian: MacEnulty writes about her subject with sympathy, wisdom and – an…

If you read Secrets & Spies, then you know that Ellen was impregnated by a German Intelligence officer in 1915. The novel I’m currently working on is the story of her child 24 years later! The novel doesn’t have a title yet, but I’m calling it “Ellen’s Girl” until I come up with something better.…

I just spent the past week listening to the audio files for my memoir The Hummingbird Kiss. Whew, that was brutal. It’s been a good four decades since the events described in that book, and I’ve done a remarkable job of erasing most of that era from my consciousness — and from my conscience. I…

Following is a letter my grandmother, Skipper, wrote to my mother, Rosalind. Bob is the youngest of Skipper’s four children. I was gobsmacked when I found this among my mother’s papers, which I am gathering to create a website dedicated to my mother’s compositions. She must have just moved into the little red house in…