May 15, 2026 - Atlanta Wire

BrittMarie Eksell’s A Joyful Way of Being Reimagines Creativity as Emotional Survival in Midlife

Atlanta Wire Staff on May 15, 2026

By: Joselin Suarez

There is something quietly disarming about A Joyful Way of Being. BrittMarie Eksell is not trying to convince readers to become extraordinary. She is not promising reinvention, breakthrough success, or a better personal brand. In a self-help landscape packed with aggressively cheerful manifestos and endless optimization rhetoric, that restraint feels almost radical. The book approaches creativity less as a talent to master and more as a way of staying emotionally awake while moving through the second half of life.

Eksell writes with the calm confidence of someone who has spent decades listening to people rather than performing expertise on them. Her background matters here. Born in Stockholm, trained as a textile designer at Pratt Institute, and later earning degrees in art therapy and health psychology, she brings both artistic instinct and clinical experience to the book. That combination gives the material a kind of grounded warmth that many inspirational books desperately want but rarely achieve. You never get the feeling she is trying to “fix” the reader. The tone is closer to accompaniment than instruction.

What makes the book land emotionally is its refusal to treat creativity as productivity. Eksell is not obsessed with output. She keeps returning instead to curiosity, memory, sensory experience, and emotional permission. Again and again, she nudges readers back toward the imaginative impulses many people abandoned somewhere between adulthood, work obligations, grief, parenting, illness, or plain exhaustion. Her argument is not that everyone secretly wants to paint masterpieces or publish novels. It is that many people slowly lose access to parts of themselves as they try to become functional adults.

That idea could have easily become sentimental, but Eksell avoids that trap because the book is rooted in real emotional terrain. Her years working in cancer hospitals, creating spaces for creative expression, give the softer reflections genuine weight. You can feel the difference immediately. When she talks about creativity as healing, it does not sound abstract or decorative. It sounds observed. There is an understanding beneath the writing that emotional expression is sometimes most necessary when people are confronting fear, aging, uncertainty, or loss.

Structurally, the book moves through client stories, personal memories, reflective exercises, and small creative invitations that feel manageable rather than performative. Some readers expecting an energetic workbook packed with colorful charts and life hacks may initially find the pace unusually meditative. Eksell lingers. She allows silence into the material. Oddly enough, that slower rhythm becomes part of the book’s appeal. It creates room for reflection instead of constantly pushing toward self-improvement milestones.

What stayed with me most was the absence of pressure. So many books about creativity quietly reproduce the same perfectionism they claim to challenge. This one does not. Eksell repeatedly gives readers permission to make things badly, slowly, privately, and inconsistently. There is something deeply relieving about that. At times, the prose even feels grandmotherly in the best possible sense. Patient. Unhurried. Entirely uninterested in turning vulnerability into a marketing strategy.

By the end, A Joyful Way of Being feels less like a manual and more like a steady hand on the shoulder. Not every reader will connect with its softer cadence, but for those exhausted by performative self-improvement culture, Eksell offers something increasingly rare. A creative life that does not depend on spectacle to matter.

In A Joyful Way of Being: Rediscovering Creative Expression in the Middle of Life, BrittMarie Eksell encourages readers to reconnect with creativity and purpose in meaningful ways. You can learn more about the book on Amazon.

Power, Legacy, and Buried Violence Collide in Paul Attaway’s Blood Rivalry

Atlanta Wire Staff on May 15, 2026

By: Loreen M

Blood Rivalry doesn’t read like a writer trying to manufacture importance. It reads like someone who has spent years sitting close enough to power to understand how quietly destructive it really is. Paul Attaway avoids the usual theatrics that drag down so many political thrillers and instead builds something heavier, slower, and honestly more unsettling. The tension here doesn’t come from explosions or cheap reveals. It comes from memory, from old loyalties rotting in place, from men who have spent decades convincing themselves they survived the past when really they just learned how to live beside it.

Set fifteen years after Eli’s Redemption, the novel picks up with brothers Eli and Walker Atkins carrying lives that appear successful from the outside but still feel cracked underneath. Eli has become a respected Charleston chef, Walker a well-established tax and estate lawyer, yet neither man has escaped the psychological wreckage left behind by the infamous “Shootout in the Swamps.” Attaway handles that lingering trauma carefully. He never overexplains it, which makes it hit harder. The past hangs over conversations, decisions, even silences. You feel it sitting in the room.

What begins as a legal matter involving Walker’s clients gradually turns into something uglier and far more dangerous when Governor Johnny Dunsmore enters the picture. The Dunsmore family is one of the strongest parts of the novel, not cartoonishly evil, not exaggerated, but cold in the believable way powerful families often are. Colin Dunsmore, the patriarch who spent half a century engineering a political dynasty, feels less like a villain and more like a force of erosion. By the time the novel reaches its later revelations, Attaway has already made it painfully clear that the real damage was done years earlier, long before the brothers understood the game they were trapped inside.

Charleston itself matters here. A lot. Attaway writes the city without romanticizing it into postcard fiction. His version of Charleston feels humid, claustrophobic, and layered with inherited influence. Wealth and reputation move through the story like old ghosts. Everybody seems connected to something buried. Everybody knows more than they say. That atmosphere gives the novel its pulse.

What surprised me most was how restrained the writing is. Attaway doesn’t chase dramatic lines every other page. He trusts the story enough to let scenes breathe, which gives the emotional moments actual weight when they arrive. There’s a conversation late in the novel between the brothers that carries more impact than most thriller finales because it feels earned instead of engineered.

The comparisons to Greg Iles are fair, especially the Natchez Burning trilogy, though Attaway’s voice feels less operatic and more intimate. There are also shades of Robert Bailey in the legal maneuvering, but Blood Rivalry leans harder into emotional fallout than courtroom performance. It’s interested in what power does to families over time, how ambition mutates into inheritance, and how violence keeps echoing long after people stop talking about it.

By the end, the novel doesn’t aim for neat redemption. It aims for reckoning. That choice gives the story its backbone. Blood Rivalry closes the Atkins Family Low Country Saga with grit, intelligence, and the kind of emotional honesty that sticks around after the final page.

Blood Rivalry: A Southern Novel of Power, Deceit, and Rebirth by Paul Attaway delivers a gripping Southern drama filled with ambition, betrayal, and personal transformation. Readers interested in powerful storytelling and layered characters can explore the book on Amazon.