Webermack.com is the home of THE THIN DOOR
and other stories of coming home to oneself. I talk about my work and why I am a writer, but this author website is also a changing space of DOWNLOADS and SHARES. Expect free how-to guides, workshop materials, and something for you in an Empty Suitcase. Come in and play.
Rho Weber Mack
BIO
Rhoda Weber Mack writes long-form young adult fiction, short stories, flash, creative nonfiction and poetry as her way of unknotting and re-knotting complexity. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, Epiphany, a BEST OF CARVE anthology, and others. Currently she is writing a linked series of YA projects around THE THIN DOOR, a YA book-as-toy which launches in Fall 2025.
Hello. Also, Introducing Myself.
My childhood began, it seems, in the twilight of the 18th Century, when Swiss Mennonite freeholders fled medieval torture and executions for the sanctuary of William Penn’s new American colony. But the long arc of my childhood began before that, with the invention of the printing press and the rediscovery of learning and independent thought in 15th C. Renaissance. It began with three Zurich University students who came to the radical idea that the individual is not an owned vassal of the feudal church-state, but a free critically-thinking adult, responsible for following one's own conscience.
My childhood in Pennsylvania was rooted in a way of life that moved slowly parallel to the rush to modernity. We were outliers to the popular culture around us, and the fence lines kept out the changing world.
But the fields of home were bounded by the unknown, and I was curious.
I asked for complexity, and I got it, full-blown and sandpaper subtle.
I rode the cusp of generational change in the late 20th C, and the world got a lot more complicated. A long trek through Middle Europe and Africa took me back to the beginnings of human history, and I fell through a hole in time. The unknowns, it turned out, were larger than the firmest of my assumptions.
These days I lift the layers of certainty to
find the clarity of contradictions. And I am seriously amused.
The original stone dwelling on the family farm, with a narrow winder staircase and the aroma of smoked hams.
Telling the story, as it comes to me, gives me voice to interplay the nuances of our contradictory and shared stories. I excavate the archives, choosing the world-building stories for this peculiar time. The world we build for ourselves is construed of the stories we choose to tell--and to believe.
WeberMack.com gives me a place to talk about those other things that matter in the time-shift of our 21st century. It's a place for me to post broadsides free for the taking. If you like it, pass it on. Come through the Thin Door, or say hi via the Contact page. Bookmark this to come back for more.