Thanks to Leslie Miller, friend and fellow blogger, who corrected some wit’s work and sent it to me. Quick as you please. She moved the series into proper order, per the drawing, and capitalized proper nouns. Hope the (surely visual) artist who did this doesn’t get mad. But then, s/he probably stole the idea from a book, maybe from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Here’s one I use in class to try to show the importance of commas, which most undergraduates …
Also known as the serial comma, and I’m a fan, too—legions of journalists and Cormac McCarthy notwithstanding . . .
There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. —Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson Grove Press, 230 pp. Novelist Jeanette Winterson’s searing memoir about life with her depressive mother in working-class England breaks the rules that American memoirists live by. By the rules I mean our emphasis on scene. I won’t bash scene—it’s vital for really conveying one’s experience—and usually scene is deepened and balanced with …
How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackle of the …
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 …
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 …
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 …