Authenticity & imagination in memoir
In an interview with Faye Rapoport DesPres in The Writer’s Chronicle (October/November 2010), Michael Steinberg, the founder of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of the memoir Still Pitching, discusses how successful memoirs and memoirists work. Steinberg exhaustively researched baseball, New York, and period histories of the 1950s for his memoir, but also used imagination as a tool to return himself to his lost boyhood. Some excerpts of Steinberg’s comments: Right now, creative nonfiction is a hotly …