teaching, education

Q&A: Lee Martin’s ‘Such a Life’

May 6, 2012 | 10 Comments

Stay in love with the journey.—Lee Martin Such a Life by Lee Martin. University of Nebraska Press, 214 pp. Lee Martin, an accomplished novelist, is also a master of life stories. His memoir From Our House focuses on his fraught relationship with his father, whose hands were mangled in a corn picker when Martin was a baby. Martin had been conceived accidentally to parents married late, his father thirty-eight and his mother forty-one, and his father had wanted to abort …

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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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Leverage of persona in memoir

March 18, 2012 | 22 Comments

Childhood tales by Jeannette Walls, Harry Crews & Annie Dillard. Joining millions of others, I’ve now read Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle. Walls wins the prize for modern memoir’s most dysfunctional family, edging out even Frank McCourt. Yet her damaged father inculcated Walls’s belief in herself—he made her feel special even as she wore filthy rags. And her equally neglectful but uniquely disordered mother banned self-pity and enshrined art of all kinds. Walls became a journalist, focused on celebrity …

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Noted: write from the pain

March 14, 2012 | 11 Comments

“You write out of need. You write out of hunger.  It isn’t your brilliance; it’s the flaw in your makeup that drives you.”—from an interview with novelist Theodore Wessner in Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process by Barbara Shoup and Margaret-Love Denman Weesner goes on: In terms of identifying talent in young writers, you can see the pain in their writing. You can see the desire, the hunger. It doesn’t have anything to do with how well they’re …

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About John D’Agata

March 7, 2012 | 8 Comments

I believe in immersion in the events of a story. I take it on faith that the truth lies in the events somewhere, and that immersion in those real events will yield glimpses of that truth. I try to hew to a narrow definition of nonfiction partly in that faith and partly out of fear.  I’m afraid that if I started making things up in a story that purported to be about real events and real people, I’d stop believing …

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Journalism & John D’Agata

March 3, 2012 | 13 Comments

“Facts are stupid things,” said Ronald Reagan in one of his priceless gaffes. He meant to say what his speechwriter wrote, that facts are “stubborn things.” They’re both. Reluctantly I address the controversy that’s been raging over John D’Agata’s fictions in his nonfiction, specifically in his book About a Mountain, which deals with the federal government’s desire to entomb nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. The topic is radioactive enough without the fallout over D’Agata’s cheerful duplicity that’s …

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The 100 best nonfiction books?

February 26, 2012 | 14 Comments

The Modern Library on its website lists the “100 best” English-language books in fiction and nonfiction. Alongside each are the best according to an online poll—and the readers’ choices consist of much trash: the top three slots of each list, fiction and nonfiction, are filled by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. Modern Library’s own considered nonfiction list is fascinating because it’s wildly diverse, reflecting the genre’s diversity, no doubt. It mixes histories and works of philosophy that have had …

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