Gretchen Roselli
Memoirist💠 Essayist 💠Playwright
Exploring reinvention, ambition, relationships, and the humor hiding in life’s messier moments. Former performer, teacher, perpetual handstander, devoted dog foster.
Gretchen Roselli is a Colorado-based writer and playwright whose work has appeared in The Colorado Sun, OnStage Colorado, bioStories, Red Rock Life, and Hormones Matter. Her humor essay “Culture Shock a Mile High” is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets.
Glitter, Grit, & Grace
A Memoir
At fifteen, Gretchen’s glamorous stage mother left for lunch and never returned. In a single afternoon, she learned that love could vanish without warning.Determined never to feel that powerless again, she builds a life around achievement—modeling in 1980s New York, falling for a married man who becomes her husband, and creating a thriving performing arts school. But when a catastrophic flood destroys the business she spent decades building, the identity she constructed begins to unravel with it.Glitter, Grit, and Grace is a candid, darkly funny memoir about ambition, abandonment, love, reinvention—and discovering in midlife that sometimes the hardest thing to rebuild is yourself.Glitter, Grit, and Grace is a 63,000-word memoir currently seeking literary representation.
About
I grew up dancing, then went on to act, sing, and model before opening a performing arts school in New York, where I spent twenty years teaching, choreographing, and producing shows. I loved watching students thrive—and the extraordinary amount of fun we had along the way.These days, I’m much happier behind the words than in the spotlight. I still love the craft of acting and enjoy reading roles for other playwrights, but what fascinates me most now is the storytelling.I write memoir, creative nonfiction, and plays, fueled by an endless fascination with people: what they say, what they don’t say, what they’re afraid of, and why we make spectacularly bad decisions while convincing ourselves they’re perfectly reasonable. I can overanalyze a two-minute conversation for an impressive amount of time, yet I’m equally happy being completely ridiculous. That contradiction finds its way into my writing: serious subjects, complicated people, and the peculiar way tragedy can become funny once enough time has passed.
Amore. I sing to him. I dance for him. He has yet to request an encore.
I’m drawn to stories about reinvention and women who refuse to accept that, at a certain age, we’re supposed to become less interesting. I have no intention of cooperating with that particular idea.I run, lift weights, choreograph my own dance workouts, listen to audiobooks, travel (the Caribbean, please), foster dogs and do handstands whenever the scenery calls for one.I still get an unreasonable high from pirouettes and cartwheels.
Respectable adults generally remain upright. I have other plans.
Selected Essays
Aunt Aggie, Bobby Kennedy, and My Parents’ Summer Theater
Recollections of a great-aunt and a New Jersey summer in the seventies.What No One Told Me Before Losing My Ovaries
What happened after surgery—and what I wish someone had told me beforehand.
Contact
Questions, comments, dog stories? I’d love to hear from you.