NOTED

Two great literary journalism archives

August 24, 2010 | 3 Comments

I’ve learned from other bloggers about two online archives of great nonfiction—mostly essayistic or at least personal, as well as reported, magazine articles. Kevin Kelly’s site KK has, under his Cool Tools category, “The Best Magazine Articles Ever,” with a “Top 25” list and extensive decade-by-decade hyperlinks. And Longform is where two guys post compelling long-form narrative nonfiction they’ve come across, both contemporary and historical. These are valuable resources for readers, writers, teachers, and students of creative nonfiction, especially at …

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Noted: Tobias Wolff

August 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

“Only at the end of the day, reading over what I’d done, working through it with a with a green pencil, did I see how far I was from where I wanted to be. In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was pleasure in having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it …

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A little more Dillard

July 13, 2010 | 7 Comments

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too—the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. That’s from Annie Dillard’s 1989 New York Times essay “Write Till You Drop,” quarried from her book The Writing Life. Yet she promises: At its best, the …

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John Updike’s impressive sentences

July 5, 2010 | 7 Comments

We are all so assimilated. Last Saturday, Hope was watching the evening news and the newscaster instead of Tom Brokaw was a perfectly stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten’s, sharp-cornered wide mouth pronouncing everything with a perfect rapid inflection, more American than American, crisper, a touch of that rapid barking voice of the     thirties gangster films and romantic comedies, and when she signed off her name wasn’t even Greek, it was more like Turkish, …

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‘Reality Hunger’ redux

June 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

Lincoln Michael at The Rumpus has written one of the most interesting and compelling responses to Reality Hunger, by David Shields, that I’ve come across. And that includes my three blog posts stimulated by the “manifesto.” Michael writes: [W]hile Shields praises the same qualities I look for in my art, the book is framed by a somewhat incoherent thesis that fiction is dead, narrative is pointless and the premier literary form of the now is the lyric essay (with memoir, …

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Offutt’s guide to literary terms

April 25, 2010 | 3 Comments

“nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers. “creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir. “memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges. “novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir. “short story: An essay written to conceal the …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.0

April 7, 2010 | 6 Comments

The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning or shaping of events. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable. The memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the “facts” and “truth.” —David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto A year ago I aired David Shields’s original …

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