memoir, biography

Narrative among the dark Danes

February 8, 2010 | No Comments

Memoir, storytelling, and Soren Kierkegaard’s sideways quest. K. Brian Soderquist, U.S.A.-born and now a Danish citizen, co-author of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony, teaches my son Tom’s Kierkegaard class this winter in Copenhagen. While on a recent field trip, Brian conveyed to Tom and to his study-abroad classmates an interesting perspective on storytelling that resonates for all nonfiction writers and especially for memoirists: “I think we should keep in mind that on this trip we’re going to hear a lot of narratives—or …

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Dinty’s Google Maps essay

January 19, 2010 | No Comments

Not especially funny or witty myself, perhaps that’s why I admire those who are: I must have opened my blog a half dozen times today to read a first sentence by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. Then tonight I read it—again—to my wife and laughed, again. It’s one of the wittiest sentences I’ve ever read. Lane’s  follow-up quip is pure gravy. “It got a rise out of Dinty, too,” I told Kathy. “He left a comment today on that …

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For the well-read writer . . .

December 11, 2009 | One Comment

If there’s a writer of any stripe on your holiday gift list, you could do worse than to buy The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4, a new boxed set that collects the journal’s fifty years of interviews with famous and emerging writers. (Take note, Claire and Tom!) E.B. White (1899–1985), gifted essayist and author of immortal children’s books, sat down for his interview with The Paris Review in 1969. The New Yorker’s great stylist, candid to the point of self-effacement, …

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“A Dry Year” nominated for Pushcart

November 27, 2009 | 9 Comments

I’m pleased to crow that my narrative essay “A Dry Year” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The essay appeared in 2009 in Chautauqua, an annual literary journal published by the Chautauqua Institution. The essay is about rebuilding a pond during a summer of biblical plagues—drought, heat, locusts, a cataclysmic storm, a flood—with a legendary Appalachian excavator. The man, in his mid-seventies at the time, was rumored to have killed a young woman in a drunken-driving accident some fifty years …

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Revise, then polish

October 25, 2009 | 2 Comments

“The writer who writes for revision does not wait for a final draft but works through a series of discovery, development, and clarification drafts until a significant meaning is found and made clear to the reader.”—Donald M. Murray, The Craft of Revision (Fifth Edition) Not many years ago, I was having dinner with a writer I admired, and when she mentioned having multiple versions of an essay I said, “You do? That surprises me.” “I’m surprised that you’re surprised,” she …

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Emotion vs. facts in memoir

October 21, 2009 | 6 Comments

Lessons from writing about dreams, loss, fatherhood & farming. On a fall day four years ago I sat down to write about my family’s experiences in Appalachian Ohio, where we lived and worked and were part-time farmers for thirteen years. It took me a year and a half to produce a manuscript of 500 pages. It took me another year and a half to cut 200 pages. And I’ve spent the last year restructuring (again). During this process I’ve learned a lot …

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Nonfiction’s intimate appeal

September 25, 2009 | No Comments

MFA student John Silvestro, studying structuralism for his English 600 class at Northern Kentucky University, sent me some of literary theorist Jonathan Culler’s musings on how readers respond to texts. Culler, quoted here in Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, may help explain the appeal that literary nonfiction has for some readers and why memoir is so stunningly popular: “As soon as we know we’re reading a piece of fiction or poetry . . . we read it …

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