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 …
Jill Talbot’s braided essay & Lee Child on creating suspense. It’s difficult for most people to verbalize the ways in which they disappoint themselves and others. The personal essay and the memoir demand that it be written down, perhaps even read aloud to others. The genre, I tell my students, is not for everyone. If you’re not comfortable with looking closely at where you have gone wrong or at least trying to find out why, you’re not going to be …
Craft as conduit to art & Brenda Miller’s seminal essay on form. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.—Bret Lott, “Against Technique” I read many student personal essays, memoirs, and literary analyses. I’m not one who bashes student writing, says kids today can’t write—the …
Bonus: Jake Adam York offers a fine minute of writing advice. We’re living in the golden age of essays, proclaims a February 18 essay by Adam Kirsch in New Republic. In “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The Essay as Reality Television,” Kirsch immediately invokes as an example John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, which in another day, with its roots in magazine pieces and celebrity profiles, might have been labeled journalism—but which, as an exciting hybrid of …