Archive for May, 2012

Q&A: Dinty W. Moore on Buddhism, creativity, kindness & taming the ego

May 20, 2012 | 9 Comments

Listen to where the writing wants to take you. Understand that the writing itself will often provide far richer material than your logical, predictable mind. Even more “intellect-driven” writing—for instance, a dissertation—can benefit from the cognitive leaps that occur when you stand back from the manuscript a moment and listen to your intuition.—Dinty W. Moore  The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore. Wisdom Publications, 152 pp.  A popular image of the writer is of someone with heavy baggage and a …

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Europe, a blog-free vacation

May 18, 2012 | 11 Comments

Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. —Jonah Lehrer* After my next post, on Dinty W. Moore’s new book The Mindful Writer, this blog is apt to fall totally silent for a few weeks. On Tuesday I’m flying with my wife and daughter to London, where we’ll meet up with our son who has been living in …

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Noted: James Brown on memoir

May 16, 2012 | 7 Comments

James Brown, a creative writing teacher at Cal State-San Bernardino, is author of the celebrated 2003 memoir The Los Angeles Diaries, which was named a “Best Book of the Year” by Publishers Weekly. Brown’s new memoir, This River, is the occasion for an interview with Duff Brenna that appears in the current Writer’s Chronicle. Brown discusses his street-punk background, the “heartbreak and dysfunction” in his family, and the unsafe, outsider feeling that’s never left him. Some excerpts: In memoir, you …

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There’s something about memoir

May 13, 2012 | 9 Comments

. . . and what writers rarely admit about rejection & revision I have a lot of friends who are fiction writers, and they all told me that writing a memoir is different—and hard.—Darin Strauss, in The Washington Post Darin Strauss became a memoirist with Half a Life, reviewed here, after publishing three acclaimed novels. I came across his admission above just after a scholar/essayist/travel writer who was visiting our campus told me, when she heard I was writing a …

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Dubus & Russo wonder: Why Memoir?

May 9, 2012 | 8 Comments

Just two (famous) novelists enjoyin’ their coffee & nonfiction Andre Dubus III and Richard Russo discuss their memoirs at The Daily Beast: “How strange to write a memoir to find out what happens.”—Richard Russo, author of the forthcoming Elsewhere: A Memoir  “I felt I was stepping into deep mysteries when supposedly I knew the story but didn’t.”—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir

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Q&A: Lee Martin’s ‘Such a Life’

May 6, 2012 | 10 Comments

Stay in love with the journey.—Lee Martin Such a Life by Lee Martin. University of Nebraska Press, 214 pp. Lee Martin, an accomplished novelist, is also a master of life stories. His memoir From Our House focuses on his fraught relationship with his father, whose hands were mangled in a corn picker when Martin was a baby. Martin had been conceived accidentally to parents married late, his father thirty-eight and his mother forty-one, and his father had wanted to abort …

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