Draft No. 4

Finding her memoir’s ‘topic sentence’

January 26, 2012 | 9 Comments

I want to prepare for the hour of my death by living one good day at a time. And I want to help others to do the same. —Shirley Hershey Showalter’s mission statement Shirley Showalter is an essayist, blogger, speaker, consultant, retired college president, granny nanny, and memoirist-in-progress, currently writing Rosy Cheeks: A Mennonite Childhood. She agreed to answer some questions after my last post about her philosophy, which is epitomized by her new, free e-book, How to Write a …

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Shirley Showalter, ubuntu & memoir

January 22, 2012 | 9 Comments

Become an observer of your own creative process. It will help you uncover where you “sing” and where your voice falls flat. When you lose track of time and are not thinking about yourself at all but rather about your purpose, your love for this world, your sheer amazement—that’s when you sing. The rest is just preparation. You might have to let it go and start over.—How to Write a Memoir by Shirley Hershey Showalter My best writing teachers over …

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Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules — for writers of all genres

January 19, 2012 | No Comments

1.     Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2.    Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3.    Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4.    Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 5.    Start as close to the end as possible. 6.    Be a sadist. Now …

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Kurt Vonnegut on making art

January 14, 2012 | 3 Comments

There’s a swell book that’s out of print now. Maybe Seven Stories will bring it out again. It’s called The Writer and Psychoanalysis by a man who’s now dead named Edmund Bergler. He claimed he had treated more writers than anyone else in his field, and being that he practiced in New York, he probably did. Bergler said that writers were fortunate in that they were able to treat their neuroses every day by writing. He also said that as soon as …

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Amos Oz’s ‘Love and Darkness’

January 9, 2012 | 5 Comments

By Olga Khotiashova A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt On January 6, 2012, it was 60 years since Amos Oz’s mother took her life. The memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, written in 2002, was a tribute to her memory as well as the act of Oz’s reconciliation with his own memories. It took him half a century to gather enough strength to perceive and articulate what had happened that day; and it …

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Chris Hitchens, God & me, pt. 3

January 4, 2012 | 17 Comments

O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. —William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” III. Reading the Bible recently, the thick New English Oxford study edition I’ve toted around for …

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