Author Q&A With Marsh Rose
Marsh Rose is a psychotherapist and freelance writer. Her creative nonfiction short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including Cosmopolitan Magazine, Salon.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Hippocampus, and others. Her short story, “False Memory,” won first prize for creative nonfiction from New Millennium Writings in 2018. Marsh is the author of three book-length works: two novels, Lies and Love in Alaska (2013) and Escape Routes (2021), and, most recently, a memoir, A Version of the Truth, published in September 2025. She maintains an online psychotherapy practice and lives in Northern California with her greyhound, Adin. Meet Marsh:
You are an author, but is it your day job? I’m a psychotherapist with an online practice on BetterHelp. I retired after 25 years with the local county’s Department of Health, and this leaves me time to write during the day. And night.
Did you always want to be an author? I always self-identified as a writer even when I wasn’t writing to be published, and started as a teeny cub reporter for the local daily paper in high school.
What is your most recent book, and what inspired you to write it? A Version of the Truth is a memoir that describes my 40-year-long relationship that ultimately wasn’t what I thought it had been. I was inspired by the hope that its message might be helpful to my readers.
How do you hope your book uplifts those who read it? My book reminds readers that we all face the unknown, and some mysteries are never meant to be solved. We live in a time when we’re promised all the answers we crave. If our traditional sources – our elders, clergy, professors, and therapists – don’t deliver, then Google and AI will. However, this isn’t always the case, and we need to find healthy ways to coexist with our own versions of the truth.
What advice would you give someone wanting to succeed in your professional industry? If you’re a potential author, my advice to you is…trust your intuition! (I love this question because it allows me to repeat the strangest advice I ever heard.) In 2011, I wrote a novel about a woman in her 40s who was trying to succeed in her profession. I was told by a literary agent that there must be a love interest, and the protagonist must be in her 20s because (here it comes) “Nobody wants to read about a middle-aged woman having sex. It will gross people out.” Whaaat?
But the advice was from an agent, so it must be right, right? I rewrote it the way she said, but I didn’t like it; nobody else did either. I put it on a shelf for the next ten years and then hauled it out, rewrote it my way, and it was published as Escape Routes in 2021. Granted, sentiments may have shifted in the years between the first and second attempts, but still. Had I trusted my gut, it might have been published sooner.
How do you handle setbacks and criticism? They hurt, but they come with the territory. And often, slogging through the setbacks pays off with an improved version of my project, and criticism can be helpful if it’s presented with well-meaning kindness.
Being an author today is like running a business. How do you manage your publicity and social media and maintain engagement with readers? I am SO bad at social media, so I found a great publicist, Books Forward, and threw myself on their mercy.
How do you hold yourself accountable and achieve the goals that you set forth? By finding writing contests or manuscript publishers with clear and reasonable deadlines for projects, I can motivate myself to let it go and submit it. Otherwise, I’ll keep grinding away on it until I have (as one of my editors said), “stomped the life out of it.”
How do you structure your day and make time for writing? Honestly? Writing is satisfying when it’s not frustrating, and even when it’s frustrating, there’s hope it will be enjoyable. So, I need to structure my day to make time for other things like dusting before my shelves develop topsoil, laundry before I’ve run out of everything in the closet, and feeding the dog, a greyhound who is tall enough to rest his muzzle on my thigh right now while I’m writing this, fix me with a baleful stare, and moan.
What book uplifts you? I always get the most from Marion Roach Smith’s book, The Memoir Project. It reminds me that memoir makes a vast contribution to the world of literature if the art and science of the genre (“creative nonfiction”) are handled correctly.
Meet Marsh and learn about her new book via her website.
