From Confession to Craft: Memoir as Its Own Reward
Back when I was a third grade geek, wanting badly to be accepted and popular (loved!), I walked home from school one day with Howard U. and Doug Y., past my own house at the bottom of Fellsmere Road and up the hill to Howard’s. We went down to the basement – one of those...
To Blog or Not to Blog? Using the Blogosphere to Shape Narrative Voice
When I was in my second year of graduate school, my favorite mentor, who had been a book editor for more than twenty years, likened my nonfiction manuscript’s narrative voice to a World War II documentary voice-over – which would have been fine if I hadn’t been writing about Nashville songwriters. My main character’s struggle...
Ten (or Twenty) Points on Publishing, Plus a Few Playful Tidbits
When to begin the process of submitting one’s work and weathering the storms of submission depend on any given writer’s sensibility – and vulnerability. Publication is the natural desire of any writer (even Emily Dickinson, who claimed she wanted all her poems burned, wrote in riddles – and have you ever told a riddle to...
Rejection: Give Up or Show Up?
It’s never fun being rejected. Unlike the acceptance that can make you scream the Sally Field Oscar speech, You like me, you really like me!, being rejected can reduce us to feelings we thought we left behind in junior high when we sat alone at the long lunchroom table. This is how it feels sometimes:...
Balancing Music and Meaning: An Interview with Kim Barnes on Short Nonfiction
In the following Q&A, contributor Gretchen Clark and author Kim Barnes delve into short nonfiction, from its definition and essential elements to the role of intuition and the moment of surprise. Kim Barnes’ novel A Country Called Home was published by Knopf in 2008. She also is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and...
“Perhapsing”: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction
At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or...
On Practice: Letter to Holly from Cougar Ridge
Editor’s note: Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes are collaborating on a book on writing tentatively titled The Pen and the Bell: Reading, Writing, and the Contemplative Life, which will feature a series of letters the authors have written to each other. Following is a sneak peek at a letter by Miller that speaks to the...
On Bridging the Distance Between Therapist and Theorist
She’s one of those therapists with a plush blond face. She leans toward where you sit, on the sofa with the pillows that are a little too squishy, in that faux living room where neither of you live. You sink into those pillows and then you get real, get intimate, get wound up in the...
Tiny Masters: An Artful Trick to Writing the Personal Essay
We’ve gone around the table introducing ourselves, and now comes the awkward moment when I sound a bit like a door-to-door salesman peddling an unfamiliar doohickey that costs too much and nobody really needs anyway. “What is a personal essay?” I’ll begin. Students start shifting uneasily in their seats. It’s that word, essay. So scholarly,...
The Fact Behind the Facts
or How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong I was a cub reporter for a small weekly newspaper, fresh out of college, where I had studied anthropology and English literature and taken not a single course in journalism. My editor was an old-fashioned newspaper man, the kind you might...
On Miniatures
Why are miniature things so compelling? First off, I don’t mean the cute or the precious, those debased and easily dismissed forms of the miniature whose size compels our pity or protection; I mean workable things on very small scales. I’d like to offer some thoughts on shortness in prose by looking at miniatures in...
Nonfiction is Translation
Nonfiction is translation, a word that literally means to “carry across.” Where translators carry a text from one language into another, nonfiction writers carry the “texts” of the worlds around us and the worlds within us to the text of words on the page. Both transports are trickier than they first appear. If all languages...
Advice to My Friend Beth’s Undergraduate Creative Nonfiction Students
One thing I like about creative nonfiction is that it allows us to tell our weird, jacked-up stories without having to change little details and try to pass them off as made-up. After all, we’ve probably each read our peers’ work in some English class during the short story unit and thought, Wait a minute …...
Of Nails, Nonfiction & Various Adhesives
My father stands behind me, watching and sweating in the Nevada sun. August is the worst possible time for roofing, but it’s the only time we have. With the temperature hovering around one hundred, I’m on my knees, hammer in hand, about to be taught a lesson in writing creative nonfiction. I take a couple...
Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction
Brief pieces of prose, meant to stand on their own, capture our attention via compression. In Short Takes, the entries range from a couple of hundred words to a couple of thousand–leaving little space for grand exposition or lengthy character development. And yet the pieces in this volume compel us with their intensity, sustain us with...
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