About Alice Archer
Will you love yourself no matter what?
I write stories to bring readers home to the safe harbor of the self, where we learn to accept who we are and love others as they are. This is the human work of equality.
The romance genre shows us how to be our own heroes.
At the place where love hurts—at the crossroads of a terrible choice, at the buried secret you dare not share—a story of redemption awaits.
I use the mediums of romantic fiction and memoir to explore acceptance and resilience in the shifting landscape of close relationships. I write to reveal the ways we are not lost.
Like me, my readers are compassionate bookworms, independent thinkers with strong hearts. We crave the life-changing journey of the complex hero and value the hard-won happy ending.
“Alice Archer has a remarkable command of character, pacing and place, even her simplest turns of phrase capable of evoking the strongest of emotions, and reading her books never fails to change me deeply.”
—Natasha Is a Book Junkie
Why I Write Inclusive Romance Big Gay Fiction Podcast Interview
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Official Bio
Alice Archer is a romance novelist who writes in the LGBTQ+ genre. Her first novel, Everyday History, was named a Top Book of 2016 in the HEA USA Today column Rainbow Trends.
Alice’s stories explore the personal growth required for true intimacy. Scheming to put fictional characters through the muck to get to a better place helps her heal and find answers. She shares her stories with the hope that others might find healing too.
For decades, Alice has helped authors as a writing coach. She lives in Oregon and requires a view of trees.
How I Got This Way
When I write, I bring in my direct experience of living in more than eighty places, and a lifetime of awareness that different is not bad. Navigating differences is how we grow. In relationships, especially close relationships, navigating differences takes courage. The ancient fear of expulsion from the tribe is real, yet the rewards of differentiating give us intimacy.
A pattern of leaving home again and again, of starting over and being “the new person,” shaped my perspectives. Living in so many places (fifteen places by the time I was fifteen) also gave me a deep interest in home, homing, and the physical objects we gather around us.
These preoccupations with the art of being different, the mechanics of intimacy, and concepts around homing weave through my writing.
An additional lens through which I view the world comes from my innate qualities of being an intuitive, highly sensing empath (if you’re a personal development nerd like I am, I’ll tell you I’m a Myers-Briggs INFJ type). A sensitive nervous system plus frequent moves gave me keen observations skills. I learned to read people and situations quickly, for my own physical and emotional safety. My writing style is often described as poetic, which could be a result of my necessary practice of sensing nuance in order to find my way in new circumstances.
Through all the moves—the new schools, people, towns, and cultures—I read. Mom told me she didn’t remember me learning to read. I just did it. I always have a lot of questions (ask my bosses about this and you’ll get an exasperated but fond eye roll). I’m hungry for information and understanding, especially from stories.
Since I was shy as a child, my curiosity took me to books and making art and the solace of nature, not to people. When I lay on the floor with a box of colored pencils or adventured in the woods or sat at the edge of a stream and played with the pebbles, I felt safe and happy. And if the information my curiosity craved came in the form of a story in a book, all the better.
Stories taught me to love myself. They gave me permission to feel all the feelings and believe I am worthy. Story did what story does for us humans—showed me how to survive and thrive.
Writing stealth stories is my life purpose. My craft (always a work in progress) is to entertain while bringing the reader home to self-love. Self-love is the place we love others from.
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Before I wrote novels, I wrote poems and letters, journal entries, articles, and more. All of that practice taught me how to identify the truth inside and express myself—privately at first, then to share.
At some point, the observation skills and the reading and writing skills combined to create an editor. Since the 1980s, I’ve worked professionally in some capacity as an editor and writing coach, for publishers or freelance.
Editing experience brings out a deeper commitment to quality in my writing. I understand a lot about the nuts and bolts of writing, from the mechanics (what works, what doesn’t, why it doesn’t, how to fix it) to the process (project development, author conniptions and fear, how to amp reader emotion, building trust, story components, etc.).
For me, quality in my writing takes time and each creation is a journey. Every book I write teaches me so much. My happy place is in the midst of writing and researching a novel. This process takes as long as it takes, usually years.
Story tells me when a novel is done. My work is to listen.
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As for where I reside now that I’m an adult who decides for myself, I’m currently in Eugene, Oregon (for the trees and the culture and the quality of the light), but I’ve dubbed myself a responsive relocator. I live in a location full-time, but am willing to move if need (escaping wildfires) or opportunity (a great job or apartment, time with dear friends) arises. Homes since 2000 have included Vashon Island, Washington; Gabriola Island, British Columbia; Freiburg, Germany; Nashville, Tennessee; and Washington, DC.
A pin on a map at Fort Worth, Texas, marks the first place I lived, where I was born. I remember nothing, because we moved when I was two.
No matter. Have pen, will travel.
We moved as often as we did because my big-hearted Dad lived to help people. Back then, he was a minister who moved from church to church around the American south, always eager to help the community through the challenges of life and celebrate the joys.
I like to joke that my dad was adopted. He was smaller, darker, and more extroverted than my mom, my younger brother, and me, who were/are tall, skinny, blonde, and introverted. Poor guy. That’s a joke, because I learned more about acceptance and love from my dad than from anyone else.
Mom’s smarts and creativity taught me the thrill of learning and reading and making things. She was always taking a class or teaching a class. Our home filled with things we’d made ourselves—pastels framed in the living room, drawings in process, hand-sewn clothes, weird wall sculptures made of rusted pieces of metal Mom found on her walks. She wrote poems in her head. Over decades of focused pursuit, Mom multiplied her skills in her favorite media (marbling, weaving, and poetry). She even went back to college at the age of 73 for a degree in production weaving.
My brother is the sweetest human being on the planet. He grew up surrounded by strong personalities and managed to come through intact. I was not as sweet, maybe because of the whole fashion (ahem) thing. Who comes up with these hairstyles, anyway?
The four of us weathered the transitions and moving boxes together for all the years of my childhood.
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As an adult, I continued to move from place to place, developing devotions to maps, cultures, environments, and orientation—the tension between lost and found.
Where am I? Where is home? How do I get there?
In my twenties, the challenge of finding home woke me to claim Earth as my safe moorage, a home of everywhere, though I didn’t define that perspective until decades later. In college, I switched my major from art to biology and environmental field studies. I pounced on natural sciences field trips and hiked through wilderness in the US and Canada. After graduation, I worked for Greenpeace, ending up as an editor on the National Toxics Research Team.
Environmental awareness, nature photography, sustainability, climate change, and the future of humans on Earth spiral through my life. The natural environment of an island in Washington State features in my novel The Infinite Onion.
I gravitate to the intersection of creativity and practicality and think of myself as an artist-scientist. In numerous jobs, I’ve fallen into roles in which I translate perspectives. I’ve taught computer skills to artists, handled graphics for science researchers, done bookkeeping for interior decorators, and managed creative marketing content for a Black, gay relationship coach with a bestselling book.
Curiosity leads me.
I write to learn and grow. I share the stories I download and interact with in the hope of helping someone else find a safe space to feel and heal.
The novels that come to me so far feature gay or bisexual male protagonists going through hell on the road to self-acceptance, spurred by the catalyst of a relationship.
The challenging, juicy process of crafting a story to communicate what’s important to me about life and living pulls together all the pieces of my world.