On Writing as an Act of Living: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of fourteen books. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, her works include the environmental literature classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and most recently, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Williams is the recipient of the...
The Ant in the Water Droplet: Locating the Mystery within Memory
The memories we have of our lives are not a continuous narrative. Instead, they are more akin to the several arcs of a skipping stone—three, four, five, six splashes and onward. Flash nonfiction is in many ways an ideal form to capture the world of those splashes of memory, fueled by the energy of the...
Tipping the Whippers
A few years ago a story attributed to John Gardner found its way into the pages of the Writer’s Chronicle. It seems that a writer in New York City received a letter awarding him a free vacation in the Caribbean. All he had to do was show up at the pier to catch the ship...
Not Every Sentence Can Be Great But Every Sentence Must Be Good
In “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year” (The New Yorker online, July 9, 2012), Michael Cunningham, one of the three Pulitzer fiction jurors for 2012, wrote the following about sentences: – I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it...
The Poetics of Urgency
When I was seventeen, in 1973, I started going to meetings of the then-young National Organization for Women. I lived in urban New Jersey and had no means of getting to NOW meetings, so I did what I knew to do then and hitchhiked. Most of the drivers who picked me up were men, and...
On Length in Literature
Every time we praise a literary book for its heft, we contribute to a kind of aesthetic confusion. The sheer length of a text is not a mark of its literary excellence or worth. Rather, it’s a reflection of the material conditions of the author’s life: a mark of the amount of time—free from more...
The Craft of Writing Queer
When I discovered creative nonfiction I’d just turned thirty, was self-schooled in queer and activist literatures, newly in love with the woman who is still my spouse, newly sober, even newly tattooed, and recently returned to university. I’d dropped out of pre-journalism school in the late 1970s, in part because no line of study fit...
My Thesis Is Not a Book: Confessions of a Lutheran Schoolgirl
This June marks the end of my graduate work in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. As the culmination of my time as a creative nonfiction student, I am compiling a thesis to convince the school that yeah, I’ve been writin’ some stuff. So, every morning this semester when friends, family and my barista ask why...
Go Ahead: Write About Your Parents, Again
I have a friend, a single man in his late forties, who still broods over the love he didn’t get—still doesn’t get—from his emotionally inaccessible parents. They are the cause of all his suffering, he believes, the cause of his failed relationships. Even as I nod compassionately over our herbal tea, I want to shake...
What Makes a Writer?
The Savoy hotel ballroom is very blue and white and gilt. It’s full of mostly-older music industry types, the kind of people whose program bios feature casual snapshots of themselves with Beatles. I’m here as a plus-one, my best friend runs the organization that stages the British Grammy-equivalent. Over the fancy luncheon, risotto with fennel...
Hungry for the Essay: An Interview with Kim Dana Kupperman
Contributor Christin Geall interviews Kim Dana Kupperman, author of the critically acclaimed essay collection I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Graywolf Press, 2010), which received the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Kupperman is the founder of Welcome Table Press, dedicated to...
Whispered Wills and Words That Bleed: On Transparency of Thought in the Essay
Let me preface what I’m about to say with this: I’ve never taken my clothes off in public, and I’m not a particularly close talker. If I have boundary issues, no one has ever told me so, and I’ve never asked, a fact that, itself, should exonerate me. Bear this in mind as I tell...
The Art of Literary Olfaction, or Do You Smell That?
Two confessions: I have a big nose, and my nose leads me. Not because it’s so big that wherever I go it arrives well before I do, but because that big nose of mine takes in a lot of smells. Last night, my husband and I took the dog for a walk. Right as we...
A Creative Nonfiction Class Interviews Ryan Van Meter
The two required texts in the fall 2011 creative nonfiction writing course I taught at St. Lawrence University were the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Touchstone, 2007) and Ryan Van Meter’s essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Sarabande Books, 2011). I contacted Ryan, asking if he’d be willing to participate in the class’s study...
Silence and Not-Knowing: An Introduction and Silence Is My Playlist (On Being Asked for One to Go with My Work)
Silence and Not-Knowing: An Introduction If I had to name our household’s mantra, it would probably be “go look it up.” This, of course, is the most basic response to not-knowing: researching in order to learn, confirm or dispel. (For example, a certain person always wanted to be a hostage negotiator, until, in her research,...
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