Twelve years ago The Gloria Sirens banded together to create this blog. Our purpose was to support women’s voices at a time when women still felt unheard.

In fact, that was around the time I discovered the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. They began publishing a count of how many works by female authors (and later other marginalized groups) appeared in the literary magazines.

Ever since the nineteen-nineties, I subscribed to The New Yorker and other gate-keeping literary journals. I developed the habit of opening the magazine and turning straight to the table of contents. I counted the number of items.

I counted the number of gendered-female names, the number of male-gendered names, and the number of names that were to me gender-toss-ups, if any. I did the math. By and large, the most encouraging percentage of writing by women would hit maybe thirty percent. It usually fell much lower. Hope for my own writing career rose or fell along with this percentage.

VIDA showed me I wasn’t the only one counting. And why counting mattered.

If you can’t empathize with my test of the prevailing winds of publishing, don’t sweat it. This was the zeitgeist in which The Gloria Sirens was born. Since then, we’ve built a kind of virtual literary sorority house. A steady core of women writers have written with us from the beginning. Others have come and gone for various reasons, mostly that the demands of work and family limit time. Our group hasn’t grown as large as we originally hoped, but it stayed manageable for us. TGS gave us a safe platform from wich to test topics, style, voice, and more. The opportunity to experiment has worked beautifully for our sister, Diane Masiello.

As Diane tested her voice, she discovered her audience.

Diane has people listening. She found a calling to speak to a niche audience of fellow Catholics, particularly Catholic parents and educators. Nothing could be more satisfying to any writer than to find her readers.

Diane and I spoke together at length about the possibility of her spinning off to write her own blog. I admired her talent, her passion, and her candid willingness to interrogate herself. I valued her friendship.

Frankly, I also appreciated her work ethic—Diane has been a reliable contributor for years. I didn’t want to lose her.

More than that, however, I didn’t want to hold her back.

Diane was hitting her stride as a Catholic writer. I wondered if readers holding other belief systems couldn’t connect. I wondered if it didn’t hold her back, even unconsciously, to know that the bulk of TGS readers likely didn’t sympathize with Catholicism. It isn’t a problem for readers to disagree, but it is a problem if you aren’t reaching the people you want to reach.

If you’re someone who looked forward to Diane’s posts, particularly those focused on her parenting and Catholic perspective, we want you to know where to find her. She’s not only learning and thriving and writing, she is receiving recognition for perspective, as she should.

Diane has started her own beautiful blog with the elegant name, Every Grace and Blessing.

Her first post, in fact, is called “Singing Solo.” It speaks of her spiritual growth through family losses, an empty nest, the COVID pandemic, and the power of writing to soothe and strengthen the soul.

We’re excited for her, we applaud her, and we uplift her. Helping a sister-writer find her voice is what we were made for.

May Diane Masiello be heard and counted among the best Catholic writers and thinkers of our time.