memoir, biography

Daydreaming, attitude & audience

September 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

Charles Allen Smart (1904–1967), author of eleven books of fiction, memoir, philosophy, and biography, was best known for RFD, his 1938 bestseller about returning to the land on his family’s ancestral farm. After his service in WW II, depicted in his memoir The Long Watch, he became writer in residence at Ohio University, the press of which returned RFD to print in 1998 under its Swallow imprint and with a new Foreword by Gene Logsdon. Smart’s thoughts, below, on the …

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Honesty and chronology, part two

September 11, 2009 | No Comments

William Zinsser addresses the issue of fidelity to chronology in his On Writing Well, and I was surprised by his answer. Perusing the thirtieth anniversary edition of this sober classic on nonfiction, I expected Zinsser to be very conservative in all matters regarding literal truth, but after a long career of successful freelance magazine and book writing he’s practical about quotes and timelines. He approves of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s composite quotes and blended timelines in his profiles. …

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Honesty and chronology, part one

September 6, 2009 | 2 Comments

Truth is a disputatious concept in memoir. I’ve said that nonfiction shouldn’t involve invented characters or scenes, unless the author cues the reader to such imaginings, because readers understand the implicit promise in the genre to abjure sleight of hand. But “memory has its own story to tell,” Tobias Wolff argues in introducing This Boy’s Life, meaning that the subjective memories of which memoir is made are the truth. And memories are tumbled in our minds into creative reconstructions to …

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Discovery and structure

July 24, 2009 | 3 Comments

Whether they’re brooders or plungers, all writers suffer the same problem, how to discover and recognize their good stuff or even to find their true subjects. Writers lament how much material they must produce and then cut. Writing can seem so wasteful, and that’s painful: the useless work! Art seems to rely on having lots to select from, but getting bogged down in the swamp in the middle of the pathless forest can dishearten: Where is this thing going? For …

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Pitfalls of first-person

July 11, 2009 | 5 Comments

I’ve been struggling through Gilead this July, trying to ascertain why I’m lukewarm, at best, toward this acclaimed book so many have savored with such pleasure from an author I respect and admire. Marilynne Robinson’s novel won the Pulitzer and rave reviews from all the large-circulation review outlets that remain in America. Gilead has earned a raft of adoring reader reviews on Amazon—too many people to have been deceived by the superficiality and log-rolling of major book reviews. But there’s …

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The abomination of faked memoir

July 5, 2009 | One Comment

from “Fiction, Fact, and Faked Memoirs,” by Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist, in New English Review “Writing a memoir, one is tormented less by the particular truth of a character’s emotion, as in fiction, and more by the emotional truth of one’s own experience. Both ‘emotional truths’ are valid; both fictionist and nonfictionist are after a similar truth—fully fleshing out the authenticity of the emotion. But now the integrity of the memoirist figures in. He must …

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“A Dry Year” in Chautauqua

June 22, 2009 | 5 Comments

My essay “A Dry Year,” about reconstructing a pond on our land with a legendary local contractor, during a season of drought, flood, heat, and locusts, appears in the new issue of the literary annual Chautauqua. The man, whom I call William, had killed a woman in an accident when he was young and wild. An excerpt: He knew our land. As a boy, he’d dragged raccoons pelts in a burlap sack behind his pony all around our farm, leaving …

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