Phoenix Writers Club Author Profile

Deborah Partington

Since graduating from college many decades ago, Deborah Partington has been a waitress in Oxford, England, registrar for the Danforth Museum School in Framingham, MA, a technical editor for Digital Equipment Corporation and Emhart Corporation, a free-lance copy editor, a professional calligrapher and instructor, and a technical writing instructor. She is now a clinical psychologist in Phoenix, Arizona, where she maintains an active private practice.

Deborah has an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a PsyD in Clinical Psychology from the Arizona School of Professional Psychology.

She earned her first master’s degree at Goddard College in 1986. For that degree, she explored the relationship between word and letterform image, with her culminating project a calligraphic exploration of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. She has been writing off and on for many years, and is the author of three published novels: Telling Stories, published by Abbott Press in 2016, Telling Shadows, published by Atmosphere Press in 2022, and Telling Secrets.

Deborah’s third novel, Telling Secrets, completes the trilogy. It is being published by Atmosphere Press and was published in 2025. Her writing reflects her interest in how personal narratives shapes lives. Telling Stories is based on the Thematic Apperception Test; the Rorschach Inkblot figures prominently in Telling Shadows. Telling Secrets, an epistolary novel, makes use of the Morgan-Greer Tarot deck to explore interconnected lives.

Deborah is also completing a collection of personal essays. “Writing My Life,” included in the collection, won first place in the Phoenix Writers Club Formidable Woman essay contest. She has been a member of PWC since 2017.

Select Publications

Telling Stories

An introverted woman is overwhelmed by all the people living inside her when she comes to see psychotherapist, Dr. Freyn, for help. As she slips into a chair in her therapists office week after week, she does not know who she is anymore. When her weekly sessions hit an impasse, Dr. Freyn encourages her to release her internal companions so they may tell their own stories. As Dr. Freyn shows her pictures--a different one each week--and asks her to tell a story based on the pictures, the patient leads the therapist through a maze of interconnected relationships, madness, suicide, growth, and synthesis as she achieves a deeper connection with herself. As her characters spin a web of narratives that span the latter half of the twentieth century, the boundaries between fantasy and reality, truth and lies, and sanity and madness become blurred as the past and future attempt to reinvent each other.

Telling Stories is the tale of one womans confrontation with her fragmented self and her journey to self-understanding through the stories of the internal characters who haunt her.

Telling Shadows

"Is my husband lying? Is he having an affair? Why doesn’t he see me?" Jacki asks herself as dissatisfaction creeps into her seemingly perfect life with her husband, psychologist James Whitehead.

Jacki is a writer. She also harbors her own secrets. At the urging of her therapist who recognizes her literary sensibilities, she keeps a journal. When she comes across her husband’s notes on EL, a gifted and tormented artist, her journal takes on a new life. As her obsession with EL grows, she probes territory that borders on delusions.

Telling Shadows invites the reader to join Jacqueline Whitehead as she experiences a year of intense transformation. With her husband’s career established, Jacki leaves her office job to pursue her own career. As her emotional entanglement with EL grows, Jacki and her husband take a long-delayed honeymoon to Paris. While there, she meets a tarot reader who cautions her against simple answers to her dilemmas about marriage, writing, and motherhood. On her return, she finds her town not changed; she has. It is up to her to free herself from the long fingers of shadows that have wrapped themselves around her.

Telling Secrets

"Partington is particularly able to navigate the journey. She writes beautifully, lyrically... Characters appear and disappear in her stories, like a braid, or a knit fabric. Artfully, deliciously, she offers touchstones..." — Pat Schneider, Founder of Amherst Writers and Artists

In the winding streets of Paris, Gabrielle Smith tends to lost souls. Between the bookshop where she works and the Tarot readings she gives, she becomes a quiet anchor for those searching for truth—whether they are ready for it or not.

Among them is Persephone, a troubled young woman unraveling the mystery of her father’s identity while struggling with addiction and self-doubt. Her mother, Natalie, carries secrets of her own, woven into the choices she makes and the past she refuses to confront. In London, Lucia faces a new reality as her vision fades, while her husband, Byron, remains haunted by the tragedy of his first wife’s suicide. Writers, artists, and lovers drift between cities, their lives entangled in letters, emails, and long-buried memories.

As the Tarot cards reveal the unseen, Telling Secrets unfolds a poignant tale of love and loss, betrayal and redemption—where the past refuses to stay hidden, and the future waits for those brave enough to face it.

Telling Secrets completes the trilogy that includes Telling Stories and Telling Shadows.

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