About Ashley S. Hattle
Ashley S. Hattle is an award-winning author and writer. Her work is featured in Nature, Invisible Project, and Spill the Ink magazines, medical journals, and scores of online articles. She has a B.A. in Journalism from Metropolitan State University of Denver (go Roadrunners!) and spent ten years as a staff writer in medical marketing and senior editor in insurance news before veering into fiction.
She is a five-time semifinalist of the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. Challenge critics have hailed short stories by Hattle as “exhilarating,” “ingenious,” and “alluring and evocative.”
Hattle's nonfiction book on cluster headaches won two awards for “Excellence in Education” from the nonprofit Clusterbusters and “Advocate of the Year” from the Association of Migraine Disorders, presented at Brown University. She’s widely recognized as an expert on cluster headaches and regularly serves on educational panels.
Hattle lives in Southwest Michigan with her family and a dog who thinks she is a cat.
Why Did I Write A Book On Cluster Headaches?
I bought every book I could find that mentioned the words "cluster headaches" after I was diagnosed in 2014. I was sorely disappointed when they arrived because they only mentioned cluster headaches in one or two paragraphs or featured miscellaneous quotes that offered more confusion than clarity. I decided I couldn't be the only one searching for information on "suicide headaches" so I set out to write the book that I needed when I was diagnosed.
With the help of Clusterbusters, headache specialists, and more than 40 patients and their loved ones, the book debuted in 2017. Cluster Headaches: A Guide to Surviving One of the Most Painful Conditions Known to Man is a best-seller in the headache genre and has helped many "clusterheads" and medical professionals understand and manage this disease.
My Aspirations
Cluster headaches stole a lot from me in the beginning: my photography work, relationships, and freedom. I struggled to understand what was happening to me and how to get better until I started working on my cluster headache book. In my research, I stumbled upon a family of other clusterheads through Clusterbusters who helped me take back my life with effective treatments. That journey and transformation catapulted me into a new career path and toward the love of my life.
I'm fortunate to have a career in writing medical content and fiction. My freelance work often helps people with their own illnesses when just ten years ago I wondered how I could possibly survive the next cluster headache cycle, let alone have a fulfilling life. My dream is for my fiction writing to take off so I can share heart-racing tales that help readers escape their reality and ails. My horror fantasy novel A Haunting Between Worlds is now available.