Ignorance, Lies, Imagination and Subversion in the Writing of Memoir and the Personal Essay
I’ve long believed that much of the power of memoir and the personal essay comes from the fact that the writer allows the reader to stand alongside him or her, participating in events that have already happened and sharing space with the author’s sensibility. To make that possible, I tell my students, it can be...
Method and Mystery: Speculation in Narrative Art
I should say right off that what I think I’m doing as a literary artist is writing toward revelation, usually revelation of a personal sort, which may or may not be of use to my readers. I also must confess that “not knowing” comes way too naturally to me. Not only that, but I’m too...
Against Knowing
Here’s a story about one of those times that made all the difference: I was in the middle of getting my MFA in a low residency program – also, I should add, in the throes of despair about my work – and I went to a reading at a gallery in Santa Monica. At some...
Discovering What Lies Beneath: An Interview with Lee Martin
In the following Q&A, contributor Dawn Haines and author Lee Martin explore the essential elements of writing: claiming place, identifying definitive moments, telling stories that resist easy resolutions, and writing that springs from “a need to know.” Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize...
So What’s Your Point? Thesis Statements and the Personal Essay
For several years I worked as a columnist for a regional newspaper. I was also a new mom and all that that implies (mostly, being cranky and in possession of few clothes that actually fastened). My column was titled “The View from the Sandbox,” and its subject was my own challenge of going from the...
Revising the Muse: An Interview with Thomas E. Kennedy
Contributor Cynthia Pike Gaylord and author Thomas E. Kennedy discuss balancing reflection and action, sorting the genuine from the false, crafting opening lines, and more. Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of eight novels, as well as several collections of short stories and essays. He has won numerous awards, including the Eric Hoffer Award, the...
Exploring Intersections: An Exercise in Dismembering and Remembering Selves
A writing exercise that has generated a great deal of excitement in my nonfiction classes is one I call the “self-adjectives” exercise. Its intent – to locate your interests and passions by listing self-descriptors – is similar to Sherry Simpson’s “tiny masters” exercise (Brevity craft essay, Issue 28) and rarely failed to spawn enthusiastic responses…until...
The Wonder of Geese
Through my office window this morning, I hear sirens. I can never remember which kind of siren makes what sound, so I can’t tell if there’s been a car accident or a fire or a hold-up at the Speedway. Then again, whenever anything happens in this town, all the emergency personnel come running. Once, the...
Using Tension and the Narrative Arc: An Interview with Tom French on Building a Dynamic Journalism Narrative
In the following Q&A, contributor Brendan O’Meara and author Tom French talk about journalism and how the writer uses tension in the story to create a dramatic narrative. In July 2010, Hyperion released Tom French’s book Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives. Within weeks, the book hit the New York Times bestseller list,...
The Necessity of Navel-Gazing
[Note: A concluding list, “The ABCs of Navel-Gazing,” is footnoted throughout the essay.] On January 6, 2009, I woke up with half a belly button.(1) That little scar from cutting the umbilical cord, a scar I usually don’t heed or notice or invoke, that cute little wrinkled indentation, was split right down the center on...
My Muse – He’s Just Not That Into Me
I believe I hexed myself. Several months ago, nodding like a bobble-head doll in agreement with the last person who lectured me on the virtues of creative discipline, I vowed to give up my haphazard ways and write every day. I set a one-year deadline to complete the writing program I’m halfway through, at which...
Flesh on the Bones: Turning Dry Ancestral Details into a Life Story
I was a budding genealogist when I entered college in my thirties to earn an undergraduate degree. When my history professor gave the class an assignment to write a research paper, I told her I wanted to write about my great-grandparents, who immigrated through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. “That’s fine,” she said, “but...
Becoming Your Own Best Critic
I worry when a person announces proudly that they’ve done a serious revision of something they wrote. Usually, that means they’ve proofread it with style sheet in hand, getting rid of, for example, a lack of agreement between a pronoun and its antecedent, like the lack of agreement I have in the first sentence with...
Excavating a Moment’s Truth
Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity took five months to write, but I spent almost ten years figuring out what this book was really about. To be honest, I spent almost ten years working on a single scene – the first full scene in the book. I rewrote that scene again and again, each time...
Back-Form.: Me ‘n’ Those Manuscripts
Edit: back-form. < Editor Conundrums and their cousins form one of the many backdrops to most of our upbringings: Which came first – the chicken or the egg? Don’t put the cart before the horse. Existence precedes essence. Something cannot come of nothing. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled...
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