teaching, education

Janet Malcolm, ‘Capote’ & ‘Infamous’

May 28, 2011 | 4 Comments

Everyone acknowledges that true stories can never be fully known—too many details lack corroboration, too many witnesses disagree about what really happened.—Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel   In Cold Blood created a sensation in America in 1966 hard to imagine today. From the start of the 2005 film Capote we see it is a revisionist look at Truman Capote and, to a degree, his blockbuster. Right away, there’s a character tut-tutting about the writer at work. …

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Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ revisited

May 24, 2011 | 8 Comments

Here’s the evocative, elegiac opening to Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood: The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, …

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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 …

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The reporter as artist

March 30, 2011 | 3 Comments

Archibald MacLeish on the fine line between poetry and journalism. “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.” —Goethe “I was signed up in the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, so I was a poet and they didn’t let you cross over. If you said you were a poet, then you had to write in those funny lines. You couldn’t switch. But when I started writing nonfiction, memoir, and the kind of prose …

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Noted: Honesty & emotion in memoir

February 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

“All memoirs have one thing in common: each book charts the struggle between the subject of the memoir and the self. Almost always the subject is something other than the writer while the self, of course, is the writer.”—Thomas Larson Tom Larson is an author, essayist, and journalist. He’s a generous writing-world friend, one with slightly different taste in memoirs than mine, neither of which negates the fact that he’s a flat-out brilliant theorist of memoir. I favor narrative-driven memoirs, …

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Review: ‘Talk Thai’ memoir

January 9, 2011 | One Comment

Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy by Ira Sukrungruang. University of Missouri Press, 169 pages People have two desires that, however fervent, are contradictory. They want to stand out, and they want to fit in. I think memoirs of overt dual identity appeal because they crystallize this universal dilemma. Growing up in the 1980s in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ira Sukrungruang was not only Asian but obese. He had that Hebrew first name—his parents had picked it …

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Stylist nabs National Book Award

November 27, 2010 | One Comment

I was glad to see a dark-horse novel, Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon, win the National Book Award recently for fiction. I hadn’t heard of the sixty-six-year-old author, and neither had a lot of folks. But I ordered her winning book, set in the 1970s at a horse-racing track in West Virginia, after reading excerpts from some of her other novels on Amazon. Lord of Misrule is about a reckless young woman and two “lonely and childless old men …

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