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Currently in production

Why I write...

I started writing when my husband was dying.

There were so many things I could not control. His body. The waiting. The not knowing if a transplant would come in time. The way life narrowed to hours, procedures, and silent prayers I didn’t yet have language for.

Writing became the one place where I was in control.

On the page, I could create a life where pain existed, but where that pain had purpose. I could shape meaning when real life refused to offer it. I didn’t know if my husband would live. I didn’t know how our story would end. I had to make sense of something that, in the moment, made no sense at all.

So I wrote a love story.
With heartbreak.
And a happy ending.

That is what my story turned out to be, too.

I write to feel.
To heal.
To share in the depths of humanity.

I write to untangle life’s messy, joyful, and hard-to-comprehend moments. To push through the pain. To let others know they can do it too. To bring a magical feeling back into my life. To have hope. To restore the moments and feelings that stole joy from me.

When I write, the words don’t arrive gently. They pour out of me, as if I’ve been here before. As if my hands remember something my mind cannot always reach. I don’t feel my own pain when I write, I feel the pain of my characters. I connect to them. I carry their heartbreak. And somehow, in doing that, I survive my own.

Writing gives me distance without detachment. It lets me hold grief without being consumed by it. On the page, pain becomes something I can move through instead of something that traps me.

I write to make sense of feelings.
To feel alive.
To feel present.

In a world that rushes past pain, that replaces depth with distraction, writing slows me down. It asks me to stay. To notice. To name what hurts and what heals. It reminds me that even the hardest chapters can still hold meaning.

I don’t write for perfection.
I don’t write for performance.

I write for impact.
For connection.
For understanding.

I write because stories are how we survive what we cannot control. Because sometimes the only way through uncertainty is to imagine an ending worth believing in. Because writing gave me a place to breathe when real life took the air out of my lungs.

I write because it saved me when I needed saving.
And because I hope quietly, fiercely that my words might help someone else too.

Maris James has been writing stories since childhood, beginning with a handmade book about a fish in elementary school and continuing through years with notebooks filled with ideas, poems, and unfinished worlds. In 2017, she wrote her first novel with more than 125,000 words in under three weeks poured out of her. An experience that confirmed writing not just as a passion, but as a calling.

A recovering workaholic once addicted to numbers, goals, data, and people-pleasing, Maris learned that worth cannot be measured by output or approval. Shaped by grit, perseverance, and walking the road less traveled alone, she writes for the seekers, for those who pour themselves out for others, reach a breaking point, and are learning how to reclaim their strength.

Her work centers on love, connection, and hope, drawn from both imagination and lived experience with caretaking, loss, and endurance. She is drawn to pain not to glorify it, but to give it purpose crafting emotionally layered characters whose journeys offer release, meaning, and renewal. Maris believes words can be a catalyst for the mind, that stories help us make sense of pain and possibility, and that a well-told love story can help remake the soul.

She currently has more than twenty-five works in progress and writes to remind readers that love still matters and that every person carries a story worth telling.

She lives where the stories keep finding her.

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