Draft No. 4

Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ revisited

May 24, 2011 | 8 Comments

Here’s the evocative, elegiac opening to Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood: The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, …

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Bill Roorbach’s tasty syntax

May 19, 2011 | 8 Comments

I read Bill Roorbach’s memoir Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey a couple times last summer. I’d been impressed with his review of my memoir for a prospective publisher, and hired him to line-edit a draft of it. Bill is a novelist, an award-winning short story writer, an essayist, the author of a popular how-to book, Writing Life Stories, the editor of a creative nonfiction anthology, and most recently a blogger. On my first readings of Temple Stream, I don’t remember …

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Q&A: Jim Minick on his earthy memoir

May 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

Desiring to grow things is surely in humans’ DNA, planted at least 10,000 years ago in our genetic code, not as old as the impulse to gather wild food, but tenured. As a boy and young man haunted by the loss of our family farm, I devoured back-to-the-land literature for years; then I farmed commercially for over a decade; and I’m now up to my eyeballs in writing my own memoir of rural life. Almost burned out on the genre …

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Reading, memoir & hurt feelings

May 11, 2011 | 5 Comments

The founder of Ploughshares, forty years ago this fall, DeWitt Henry is a novelist and memoirist who teaches at Emerson College in Boston. His books include Safe Suicide: Narratives, Essays, and Meditations, a collection of linked essays on his generation and on his quest for psychological and spiritual truth; and a novel, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, about a working-class Philadelphia woman whose life is upset by the death of her father and by her younger sister’s takeover of …

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Agent Betsy Lerner on editing, structure

May 8, 2011 | 9 Comments

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner. Riverhead, 304 pages I suggest you stalk your demons. The more popular culture and the media fail to present the real pathos of our human struggle, the more opportunity there is for writers. If you have been unable to make your work count or stick, you must grab them by the neck and face them down. And whatever you do, don’t censor yourself. There’s always time and …

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Q&A: Lisa Davis on a Mormon tragedy

May 4, 2011 | 3 Comments

The Sins of Brother Curtis: A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church by Lisa Davis. Scribner, 368 pages. I met Lisa Davis six years ago, in a creative nonfiction workshop at Goucher College, and I read her recently published The Sins of Brother Curtis first out of loyalty to a friend and then with increasing admiration for her work. Davis, a San Francisco journalist and a teacher at Santa Clara University, has painstakingly crafted a gripping narrative about …

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Phillip Lopate on literary nonfiction

April 27, 2011 | 13 Comments

An esteemed essayist and theorist, the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate was interviewed in 2008 by Lania Knight for Poets & Writers Magazine, online version. I just stumbled across it, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Some excerpts: Creative nonfiction is somewhat distortedly being characterized as nonfiction that reads like fiction. Why can’t nonfiction be nonfiction? Why does it have to tart itself up and be something else? I make no apologies for …

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