by Writing Workshops Staff
6 minutes ago
Our alumni survey asks writers to finish a sentence: Before taking the workshop, my writing life was ________, but now it’s ________. Diana Louise Webb had this to say, and we couldn't be more excited for her:
“Before taking the workshop, my writing life was stuck in neutral, but now it’s on fire!”
The evidence is on the book shelf. Since traveling to Ireland, Diana has traditionally published two books — Book One and Book Two of her Broken Reflections trilogy — and collected awards for both her debut and the follow-up. Her first novel, Last of the Autumn Rain, earned recognition as an Independent Press Awards Distinguished Favorite and took home the Literary Titan Gold Book Award. Book Two, A Twisted Crucible: The Riddle of the Ruined Soul, arrived this year.
A Week in Dublin
Diana joined our Dublin workshop in May 2025, and she brought her mother along. Her fiction cohort was led by Christine Pride, a novelist who spent years as an editor at Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon & Schuster before publishing her own books — most recently her solo debut, All the Men I’ve Loved Again, from Atria. It is a useful combination for a writer with a trilogy to place: an instructor who can tell you what a chapter is doing and, in the same breath, what an acquiring editor will make of it.
Diana’s verdict on the workshop was one word: “phenomenal.” Of the faculty in Ireland as a whole — Christine, alongside Tawny Lara and Alyssa Songsiridej — she said they were “exceptionally articulate and insightful, making it impossible to choose a favorite.” Asked what she enjoyed most, her answer was four words long: “The variety of input.”
What stayed with her had as much to do with the room as the syllabus. “Surrounded by supportive staff and fellow authors in Ireland,” she wrote, “experiencing its rich history proved how beautifully literature unites the world.”
The Books
The Broken Reflections books are psychological thrillers, and they earn the label the hard way. Last of the Autumn Rain opens with a catastrophe at a nightclub in 1983 and follows Julie Cromwell back to her childhood home in Trenton, New Jersey, where memory keeps refusing to hold still. Diana builds the novel from fractured timelines, flashbacks, and an inner monologue that slides between lucidity and something considerably less reliable. Reviewers have noticed that the disorder is deliberate: the structure is doing the same work as the story, putting the reader inside a mind that cannot be trusted to narrate itself.
A Twisted Crucible pushes Julie further down that road, literally — a cross-country drive toward Trenton that turns into a catalog of bad decisions and worse company, shadowed throughout by a father facing an impossible choice. Diana holds a Juris Doctorate and a psychology degree, and she has interviewed some of the most notorious female killers in the United States. That research is legible on the page. Her antagonists are not devices; they have interiors, and the books are more unsettling for it.
The Project Keeping Her Up at Night
Ireland also started something neither Diana nor her mother expected. The two of them are now at work on her mother’s memoir, an account of her childhood as a survivor of Nazi Germany and her family’s flight from East Prussia. Her mother turns 91 this year.
“This memoir will be deeply unique because it offers a rare, firsthand window into World War II. It intimately captures the resilience and survival of my mother navigating unimaginable history in East Prussia. Above all, it serves as a powerful, living legacy written from a place of profound personal truth and triumph as she reaches her 91st year.”
That work feels urgent, and Diana and her mother are full speed ahead.
What She’d Tell You
We asked Diana for her secret weapon when the writing gets hard, and her answer is worth stealing. “When the energy dips, rather than forcing myself to grind it out, I shift the mindset from work to discovery and churn out more ideas which I can organize at a later time.”
And for anyone hesitating over a destination retreat, she says: “You absolutely have to experience a destination writing workshop! Taking your craft somewhere entirely new — surrounded by inspiring landscapes, incredible fellow writers, and dedicated mentors — it does something magical for your creativity.”
Diana lives in Missouri, where she and her mother travel together as keynote speakers on resilience. Book Three, Game of Souls: The Reckoning, is on the way. You can find her at dianawebb.us, and A Twisted Crucible is available now. One week in Dublin was a small stop on a much longer road, and it is a pleasure to watch where she’s driving.
Every writer we work with arrives with something already in motion. Our job is to put you in a room with instructors who have done the work and peers who take yours seriously — whether that room is on Zoom or in a hotel in Dublin. Writers who study with us go on to publish, win awards, and finish the books they had been circling for years. Browse our online creative writing workshops and find the class that gets your writing out of neutral.
