honesty

Virginia Woolf on a writer’s education

October 31, 2010 | 7 Comments

“. . . [A] writer’s education is so much less definite than other educations. Reading, listening, talking, travel, leisure—many different things it seems are mixed together. Life and books must be shaken and taken in the right proportions.” “Let us always remember—influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive.” And: “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” “A writer is a person who sits at a desk and keeps his eye …

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Authenticity & imagination in memoir

October 22, 2010 | 5 Comments

In an interview with Faye Rapoport DesPres in The Writer’s Chronicle (October/November 2010), Michael Steinberg, the founder of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of the memoir Still Pitching, ­discusses how successful memoirs and memoirists work. Steinberg exhaustively researched baseball, New York, and period histories of the 1950s for his memoir, but also used imagination as a tool to return himself to his lost boyhood. Some excerpts of Steinberg’s comments: Right now, creative nonfiction is a hotly …

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Interview: Daiva Markelis on memoir

October 8, 2010 | 8 Comments

Daiva Markelis, a professor at Eastern Illinois University who blogs at The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman, answered some questions for Narrative about her memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life, reviewed in my last post. RSG: The first thing I noticed about your book was your easy, seemingly natural voice. Was finding this consistent, personal voice easy or difficult? DM: I belong to a writing group–the Eastern Illinois University Writer Babes; the babes are great at pointing out …

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Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’

September 14, 2010 | 11 Comments

Literary artistry and a chilly persona imbue this classic memoir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak, Memory, with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface …

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Fairness & John McPhee’s ‘Archdruid’

August 6, 2010 | 2 Comments

[H]uman judgment tells you what to do in journalism—not god or the rule book or the facts. That’s not a trivial point: journalism is saturated with judgment, and a lot of that judgment belongs to the individual journalist. The trouble arises (and this is the whole reason we have the bias debate) because American journalists some time ago took refuge in objectivity, and began to base their authority on a claim to have removed bias from the news.—Jay Rosen “What’s …

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‘The Art of Time in Memoir’

July 26, 2010 | 8 Comments

Sven Birkerts views “double vantage point” as genre’s signature. Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.—Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts. Graywolf. 194 pages What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir? The question isn’t as dumb as it may appear. A novel can be autobiographical, drawn completely from life remembered; a memoir is of course made of memory …

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Dave Eggers on journalism’s virtues

May 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

Author Dave Eggers burst onto the literary scene with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; his latest book, Zeitoun, is about the Homeland Security/FEMA ordeal suffered by a Syrian-American immigrant and his family in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Eggers recently gave an interview to Jeff Gordinier for Creative Nonfiction (Spring 2010) in which he talked about the immersion journalism he undertook to report Zeitoun. He talked about the influence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road …

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