Blended: Writers on the Stepfamily Experience

95 million adults have a step relationship, according to a 2011 report. That s 95 million unexpected experiences; 95 million unique perspectives; 95 million laughs, 95 million tears, and 95 million new families.
Blended explores stepfamilies from the inside out through the perspectives of thirty writers who know what it s like first hand. Sometimes funny, often poignant, and always deeply personal, the stories in Blended capture the essence of stepfamilies in all of their weird and wonderful varieties. The journeys range from the first encounters between new step-relatives, to marriages, honeymoons, daily experiences, and divorces. The diverse voices in Blended reflect the realities of today s world, in which yesterday s ideas of family structures and types just don t cut it anymore. Parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins: all of these relationships change when families are melded into one, and the writers of Blended help explore the truth of what these new relationships look like, and, especially, feel like. Blended offers something for everyone: laughter, wisdom, empathy, and guidance, and, above all, the knowledge that you are not alone.
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Samantha Waltz has been writing since childhood. She sold her first story at age eleven to a local newspaper. Her next stories were published in American Girl, and she later worked as a guest editor and assistant editor for Mademoiselle. Her books include Parenting: Four Patterns In Childrearing, Parenting Gifted Children, and Gifted Child: Master Piece in the Making. Currently she has over sixty personal essays in anthologies including the Seal Press anthologies Ask Me About My Divorce and Why We Ride.
The development of Blended calls on her experience as a stepparent, a family therapist, and a teacher of classes and workshops on parenting and child development. She has received awards for her nonfiction writing from the Oregon Writers Colony, and was the Grand Prize winner of the Redbook/Cup of Comfort Love Story contest.
Waltz has extensive editorial experience. She taught English composition for fourteen years, and has been in critique groups of professional writers for 18 years. Currently she teaches Tell Em and Sell Em workshops on writing and selling the personal story, and has worked with hundreds of workshop participants to craft excellent pieces.
Her early writing is under the names Samellyn Jones and Samellyn Wood.
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