essay-personal

Dinty W. Moore on essays, essaying & earning self-knowledge

September 24, 2010 | 13 Comments

Dinty W. Moore’s books include a popular spiritual inquiry, The Accidental Buddhist, and an award-winning, nontraditional “generational memoir,” Between Panic and Desire. His new book—his sixth—is Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Writers Digest Books, 262 pages). “The personal essay is a gentle art,” he writes, “an idiosyncratic combination of the author’s discrete sensibilities and the endless possibilities of meaning and connection. The essay is graceful, wise, and always surprising. The essay invites extreme …

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Any memoirist’s dilemma

August 31, 2010 | 10 Comments

“A fundamental dilemma for autobiographical essayists is how exactly to navigate between the necessity to write and the sinking realization that it may not really matter to anyone else. All writers, all artists, deal with this problem, of course, especially at this point in time, when via the blogosphere and social media literally millions of autobiographical missives are launched weekly, each voice clamoring for an audience of careful, sympathetic readers.” I can really relate to this quote from Joe Bonomo’s …

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America’s greatest essay

August 29, 2010 | 3 Comments

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”—James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” from Notes of a …

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Two great literary journalism archives

August 24, 2010 | 3 Comments

I’ve learned from other bloggers about two online archives of great nonfiction—mostly essayistic or at least personal, as well as reported, magazine articles. Kevin Kelly’s site KK has, under his Cool Tools category, “The Best Magazine Articles Ever,” with a “Top 25” list and extensive decade-by-decade hyperlinks. And Longform is where two guys post compelling long-form narrative nonfiction they’ve come across, both contemporary and historical. These are valuable resources for readers, writers, teachers, and students of creative nonfiction, especially at …

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