Spirituality, authenticity & Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. — Letters to a Young Poet As a broody kid, growing up in a Florida beach town and grieving my family’s exodus from our farm in Georgia, I found a library book by a guy about his hobby farm. I loved it, probably sensing …
It takes a village to raise a child, and my village was the graveyard.—from Rachael Hanel’s memoir We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter by Rachael Hanel. University of Minnesota Press, 177 pp. Rachael Hanel grew up in a sleepy Minnesota town where old people “have more faith that cars will stop for them than they have in Jesus Christ.” But where her gravedigger father could joke, with a darker edge than any …
Lee Child: Write What You Feel. Having just featured Lee Child on using questions to propel narrative, I was intrigued with this explication of more of Child’s advice by blogger Wilson K.
Beyond ‘crazy shit’ content: stories that intrigue, inform, illuminate. I want to believe we can think of memoir in terms of the author’s personal connection to the ideas in the book; that the form, at its best, can use personal experience to gather up the distinct threads of a book and bring them together into a narrative of thought that is more compelling and nuanced than a simple summary of the crazy shit that happened. Perhaps memoir can be …
William Zinsser affirms a truth: intention trumps craft. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet In this blog largely about craft, sometimes I must remind myself that intention is more important than craft. That is, the spirit behind the work is at least as important as that which makes it visible. I saw this …
High interest in creative nonfiction swamps small rooms. Guest Post by Janice Gary The AWP is always such an exhausting, exhilarating and mind-blowing experience. Home now and coming down from the high, I’m overwhelmed with writing ideas and new ways of thinking about writing and appreciation for my writing colleagues—both those I reconnected with and those I met along the way. We are all each other’s teachers, and nowhere is that more evident for me than at the AWP Conference. …
Setting up & already networking at earth’s biggest writers’ confab. Guest Post by Janice Gary I arrived in Boston a day earlier than the start of the conference courtesy of Winter Storm Sandy. With time on my hands, I was able to help Goucher MFA Director Patsy Sims set up her table and get an inside look at the Expo Center. So what happens early? Folks drag their posters and brochures and books into the halls, greet old friends, and …