Category Archives: NOTED
Essay’s ancient spell, memoir’s transformation
[The essay] should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last word. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may … Continue reading
Filed under essay-classical, essay-expository, memoir, NOTED, postmodernism
‘Our Secret’ by Susan Griffin
Often I have looked back into my past with a new insight only to find that some old, hardly recollected feeling fits into a larger pattern of meaning.—“Our Secret” Susan Griffin’s long essay, a chapter in her book A Chorus … Continue reading
Shirley Showalter, ubuntu & memoir
Become an observer of your own creative process. It will help you uncover where you “sing” and where your voice falls flat. When you lose track of time and are not thinking about yourself at all but rather about your … Continue reading
Filed under electronic publishing, memoir, MFA, NOTED, spirituality, teaching, working method
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writers
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character … Continue reading
Filed under Dillard—Saint Annie, emotion, NOTED, structure, working method
Kurt Vonnegut on making art
There’s a swell book that’s out of print now. Maybe Seven Stories will bring it out again. It’s called The Writer and Psychoanalysis by a man who’s now dead named Edmund Bergler. He claimed he had treated more writers than anyone else … Continue reading
Filed under NOTED, working method
Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest … Continue reading
Filed under memoir, NOTED, spirituality
Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the Past’
From it all I gathered one obstinate and enduring conception. That nothing is to be so much dreaded as egotism. Nothing so cruelly hurts the person himself; nothing so wounds those who are forced into contact with it.—Virginia Woolf, writing … Continue reading
Filed under emotion, memoir, NOTED, spirituality
Noted: William T. Vollmann
I believe in the American myth that it is both admirable and even possible to devote one’s life to a private dream. The probability of failing oneself, either through laziness, incompetence or bad luck, or else, worse yet, through dreaming … Continue reading
Filed under fiction, journalism, NOTED, syntax, working method
Nina Hamberg’s memoir ‘Grip’
After being assaulted in her own bedroom by a masked intruder when she was a teen, Hamberg found her relationships with men complicated, to say the least. In this thoughtful memoir, she shares the victories and defeats that shaped those … Continue reading
