religion & spirituality

Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy?’

June 19, 2012 | 10 Comments

There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. —Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson Grove Press, 230 pp.  Novelist Jeanette Winterson’s searing memoir about life with her depressive mother in working-class England breaks the rules that American memoirists live by. By the rules I mean our emphasis on scene. I won’t bash scene—it’s vital for really conveying one’s experience—and usually scene is deepened and balanced with …

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Q&A: Dinty W. Moore on Buddhism, creativity, kindness & taming the ego

May 20, 2012 | 9 Comments

Listen to where the writing wants to take you. Understand that the writing itself will often provide far richer material than your logical, predictable mind. Even more “intellect-driven” writing—for instance, a dissertation—can benefit from the cognitive leaps that occur when you stand back from the manuscript a moment and listen to your intuition.—Dinty W. Moore  The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore. Wisdom Publications, 152 pp.  A popular image of the writer is of someone with heavy baggage and a …

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Review/Q&A: Alethea Black on ‘Lovely,’ faith & fiction, essays & cutting to bone

April 29, 2012 | 9 Comments

I can only speak for myself, but there’s something about writing at night that feels . . . sneaky. There’s an outlaw quality to it, combined, oddly enough, with a sense of being safe. It has an anaerobic, subterranean feel; it’s as if I’m working beneath the soil, toiling in secret, trying to cultivate something hidden and occult.—Alethea Black, “Essay to be Read at 3 a.m”  I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Alethea Black. Broadway Books, 238 pp. I read …

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Emerson meets ‘A Girl Named Zippy’

March 21, 2012 | 7 Comments

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean? Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must …

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Showalter: memoir as ‘radical act’

January 31, 2012 | 5 Comments

My interview with Shirley Hershey Showalter concludes with her discussion of her writing process and of her vision for the potential for memoir, a “radical act,” to build peace in the world. Q: You prepared for writing a memoir by reading and attending workshops, so I suspect you’re a what fiction writers call a “pantser” instead of a “plunger” for the actual writing. Did you outline what you’re now writing or make a timeline or otherwise make yourself a roadmap? …

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Finding her memoir’s ‘topic sentence’

January 26, 2012 | 9 Comments

I want to prepare for the hour of my death by living one good day at a time. And I want to help others to do the same. —Shirley Hershey Showalter’s mission statement Shirley Showalter is an essayist, blogger, speaker, consultant, retired college president, granny nanny, and memoirist-in-progress, currently writing Rosy Cheeks: A Mennonite Childhood. She agreed to answer some questions after my last post about her philosophy, which is epitomized by her new, free e-book, How to Write a …

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Shirley Showalter, ubuntu & memoir

January 22, 2012 | 9 Comments

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 purpose, your love for this world, your sheer amazement—that’s when you sing. The rest is just preparation. You might have to let it go and start over.—How to Write a Memoir by Shirley Hershey Showalter My best writing teachers over …

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