NOTED

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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For teachers & kind souls elsewhere

October 26, 2010 | 9 Comments

“Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need. “And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.” This excerpt is from Ghostbread, a memoir by Sonja Livingston. University of Georgia …

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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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A novel on memory, story & alibi

October 13, 2010 | 4 Comments

A colleague here at Otterbein University, Noam Shpancer, a psychologist, has just hit the big time at age fifty-one with his first novel, The Good Psychologist. Early reviews are positive to raves: Kirkus gave it a starred notice, Alan Cheuse reviewed it on NPR, and the Boston Globe called it “extraordinary” and “a rare gift.” Bought by Henry Holt at an auction conducted by Noam’s agent, the story is about a therapist who’s treating a stripper with stage fright. And it’s about the …

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Lucy Grealy’s ‘Autobiography of a Face’

September 19, 2010 | 8 Comments

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people . . .”—Lucy Grealy Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is an account of her childhood and young adulthood struggling with surgeries, treatments, and disfigurement from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the jaw. She conveys so well the aloneness of a sick child, at the mercy of hospital staff, and the effect of looking different from other people. Even when she wasn’t …

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Any memoirist’s dilemma

August 31, 2010 | 10 Comments

“A fundamental dilemma for autobiographical essayists is how exactly to navigate between the necessity to write and the sinking realization that it may not really matter to anyone else. All writers, all artists, deal with this problem, of course, especially at this point in time, when via the blogosphere and social media literally millions of autobiographical missives are launched weekly, each voice clamoring for an audience of careful, sympathetic readers.” I can really relate to this quote from Joe Bonomo’s …

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America’s greatest essay

August 29, 2010 | 3 Comments

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”—James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” from Notes of a …

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