immersion

Edward Humes on structure

January 20, 2011 | No Comments

Edward Humes won a Pulitzer prize when he was a newspaper reporter and has gone on to write ten books, nonfiction narratives about crime and public issues. His website/blog is worth visiting. Today I stumbled across his helpful essay on structure and immersion, “A Brief Introduction to Narrative Nonfiction,” which used to be available on his site—I think that’s where I got it, anyway—and which I’d saved in my computer. Some excerpts: I hated the fact that Bill Leasure, the …

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Stylist nabs National Book Award

November 27, 2010 | One Comment

I was glad to see a dark-horse novel, Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon, win the National Book Award recently for fiction. I hadn’t heard of the sixty-six-year-old author, and neither had a lot of folks. But I ordered her winning book, set in the 1970s at a horse-racing track in West Virginia, after reading excerpts from some of her other novels on Amazon. Lord of Misrule is about a reckless young woman and two “lonely and childless old men …

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Can journalism schools teach narrative?

October 17, 2010 | 6 Comments

Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd.—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker (September 6, 2010) What is journalism? How does one teach this thing you have so defined? I haven’t an answer to either question, but that places me in good company because I think most journalism schools haven’t had a clue, at least concerning the best way to educate their students as writers. With …

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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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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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Digging deeper

June 7, 2009 | No Comments

from the website of Sandra Scofield a novelist and author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir “[I]n memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig …

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Lee Gutkind on immersion journalism

April 23, 2009 | One Comment

From an interview with nonfiction guru Gutkind conducted by Eric Parker for Fresno Famous— “[I]mmersions are so wonderful in that you walk into an immersion having an idea, idea A, but by the time you’ve spent three months or six months, you have a new idea, or a different formulation of your idea. Then, if you spend another year or two, your idea sophisticates and focuses even more. So, it’s a constant balancing challenge to make sure that you are …

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