Ian Frazier tells an amusing story in The New Yorker (May 26, 2008) about a man at a soup kitchen who dismissed Frazier’s credentials as a writing coach. The guy blew off Frazier, sitting at a card table soliciting for a writers’ group, saying he’d already had a famous teacher, novelist John Cheever. Frazier asked him what he’d learned, and quotes the guy: “Cheever, you understan’, he was a brilliant writer. When he wrote something he always had two things …
Eudora Welty’s great short essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing in vivid details instead of telling readers what to feel. As for the store, it’s a realm of children on errands and of a grocer who waits for them to “make up …
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 111 pp. $9.56 Sometime after the excitement of beginning her book a serious writer will discover her work’s own “intrinsic impossibility,” says Dillard. Eventually she’ll probably throw out the main point, her grand vision, and settle for the more modest discovery she made in writing. If a writer had any sense, she’d devote herself to a career selling catheters. The Writing Life is about persistent inquiry and love. A sort of commiseration, …
The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction by Dinty W. Moore. Pearson/ Longman. 302 pp. $42.48 The Truth of the Matter, which I’ve used twice now in a 300-level undergraduate introduction to narrative nonfiction, is a complete textbook that can stand alone or be paired with supplemental anthologies such as The Art of Fact, Short Takes, Intimate Journalism, or The Best American Essays of the Century, depending on the instructor’s focus. The first third of The …
“I have no idea what this means, but I love it,” Chuck said about Julie’s phrase “the everlasting sting” of illegal drugs she’d taken at 14. There were murmurs of approval in the room. “Yes,” I said, “it works.” “But why does it work?” asked Julie herself, now all of 19, her misspent youth behind her. We’d been in class almost two hours, workshopping for almost an hour, and I was tired. I couldn’t answer her fair question. She’d broken …
“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.”—Rainer Maria Rilke Whether composing a poem, struggling with a memoir’s narrative structure, or trying to depict a city’s homelessness problem through one family’s struggle, a writer can be trying to offer a gift to the world. Therefore it’s fitting that an insightful essay on revision in …