How Cheryl Strayed feathers her compelling backstory into Wild. . . . I spun the backstory. I dole it out. The trail is a chronological report of my hike; what came before the trail is not chronological. I give you a scene from when I was seven and then another the year before [the hike]. I worked that pretty hard.—Cheryl Strayed in an interview The second time through Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, …
Guest Post by Janice Gary While reading the latest issue of The New Yorker, I came across “The Hunger Diaries,” excerpted entries (March-June, 1952) from the journal of novelist and short story writer Mavis Gallant. From the very first sentence, the writing captivated me, plunging me into a world both exotic and maddeningly boring, a life narrated in cinematic detail by an unforgettable voice. An armed guard in gray, a church, a wild rocky coast which rushes a steel sea… …
I used to consider the use of test audiences as Exhibit A that movies are an inferior art form—talk about lowest common denominator! plus there’s no such thing as art by committee!—then it occurred to me that I and most writers do the equivalent. All our friends’ reactions, our workshopping at conferences, our submissions to editors and agents, and our use of prose doctors of various kinds amounts to exactly the same thing, a big fat test audience. The movie …
A deeply processed tribute to Nora Ephron. I admire it.
How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackle of the …
James Brown, a creative writing teacher at Cal State-San Bernardino, is author of the celebrated 2003 memoir The Los Angeles Diaries, which was named a “Best Book of the Year” by Publishers Weekly. Brown’s new memoir, This River, is the occasion for an interview with Duff Brenna that appears in the current Writer’s Chronicle. Brown discusses his street-punk background, the “heartbreak and dysfunction” in his family, and the unsafe, outsider feeling that’s never left him. Some excerpts: In memoir, you …
Elizabeth Browne has wrung out the gems in the fascinating NYT story about Robert Caro and his working process.