dramatized/scene

Phillip Lopate on literary nonfiction

April 27, 2011 | 13 Comments

An esteemed essayist and theorist, the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate was interviewed in 2008 by Lania Knight for Poets & Writers Magazine, online version. I just stumbled across it, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Some excerpts: Creative nonfiction is somewhat distortedly being characterized as nonfiction that reads like fiction. Why can’t nonfiction be nonfiction? Why does it have to tart itself up and be something else? I make no apologies for …

[Read More]

2nd scene from my memoir

November 12, 2010 | 8 Comments

(This scene, from seven chapters after the first one I posted, isn’t quite as packed, and perhaps the characters introduced last time are becoming clearer.) Mom called me at the office from our house with news to report: “A man was just here asking for you. He wanted to make sure you gave him permission to hunt, because your neighbor is upset.” “What was he driving?” “A big green pickup.” “That’s Ed McNabb. He lives on the other side of …

[Read More]

A scene from my memoir

November 6, 2010 | 15 Comments

I walked into Ernie’s & Jim’s Barbershop, clutching a stack of old issues of The Stockman Grassfarmer and Jim’s horse-training videotape, and arrived to find the shop empty except for Jim. He lounged in his barber chair, smoking a Marlboro, roosting in the window wall’s golden light like an old-time porch-sitter, doing nothing with palpable enjoyment, one of those people who can sit and think. I knew he was dreaming about his farm. Jim had warmed to my proselytizing about …

[Read More]

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 …

[Read More]

Lessons from writing my memoir . . .

August 22, 2010 | 17 Comments

Five years ago I began writing a memoir about my experiences farming in Appalachian Ohio. My official start was September 1, as I recall, but I was gearing up at this time of year, in late August, when the common Midwestern wildflowers are blooming. Right now, you can see flowering together in fertile meadows and damp unkempt roadsides: purple ironweed, saffron goldenrod, yellow daisies, and, above it all, the airy mauve bursts of Joe Pye weed. Shade trees look dusty …

[Read More]

Pulitzer winner on scene & structure

July 1, 2010 | 2 Comments

Today’s Mother Jones online features a fascinating interview with Gene Weingarten, now a semi-retired humor columnist for The Washington Post, who won two Pulitzer prizes for feature writing, most recently for his story about parents who forgetfully leave their children locked inside hot cars. He’s the author of The Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of his stories that originally appeared in the Post and its Sunday magazine. Interviewer Michael Mechanic writes that “very few living nonfiction writers could ever …

[Read More]

Keys to conveying experience

May 27, 2010 | 3 Comments

Theorist Peter Elbow urges writers to experience their own words. Writing theorist Peter Elbow believes a key to effective writing is getting readers to breathe “experience” into the words. To accomplish this effect, the writer must first have the experience herself. “Narrative,” he observes, “is a way to get your reader’s attention, but it is a rudimentary kind of attention, mere curiosity about what happens next. It doesn’t make her actually build an experience in her head. Narrative is powerful but …

[Read More]