Eudora Welty’s great short essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing in vivid details instead of telling readers what to feel. As for the store, it’s a realm of children on errands and of a grocer who waits for them to “make up …
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 111 pp. $9.56 Sometime after the excitement of beginning her book a serious writer will discover her work’s own “intrinsic impossibility,” says Dillard. Eventually she’ll probably throw out the main point, her grand vision, and settle for the more modest discovery she made in writing. If a writer had any sense, she’d devote herself to a career selling catheters. The Writing Life is about persistent inquiry and love. A sort of commiseration, …
The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction by Dinty W. Moore. Pearson/ Longman. 302 pp. $42.48 The Truth of the Matter, which I’ve used twice now in a 300-level undergraduate introduction to narrative nonfiction, is a complete textbook that can stand alone or be paired with supplemental anthologies such as The Art of Fact, Short Takes, Intimate Journalism, or The Best American Essays of the Century, depending on the instructor’s focus. The first third of The …