The Power of Writing in Threes: The Triptych
The Power of Three Writing a triptych, or an essay consisting of three parts, allows the writer to explore a topic in a layered form. Originally from the Greek word triptychos, meaning three folds, the triptych became popular with visual artists in the Middle Ages. Like the artist presenting three separate panels as a singular...
Guest Artist Barbara Gillette Price
I tend to work thematically, pursuing a body of paintings through the labyrinth of imagination. The themes may change, but the intrinsic role of color is constant. The Color as Metaphor paintings appear abstract and formal at first, yet each is a fragment of a surface and setting chosen for the way the light played optically....
I Know My Body Tried to Save Me
Dirty, Poz, Faggot, G.R.I.D: pseudonyms for the boy I don’t want to be. Gay-related. Gay-related. I don’t want to be gay-related. I don’t want to be human-immunodeficient either. I don’t want to be in this I.D. clinic reading Tiny Beautiful Things, a book of collected advice columns, a bible that replaced my bible, turning random...
Writer and Editor as Creative Collaborators
My years in corporate communications taught me how to churn out copy that met deadlines and management messaging strategies. I built a career but lost my drive as a creative writer. Criticism came fast post-publication, but collaboration during the drafting process was absent. I was a solo operator and just kept stringing words together on...
On the Aside Looking In
I’m not good at keeping secrets, but I love collecting them. Of course, I’m not saying that I can’t keep my friends’ secrets (though maybe I’m writing that on the off chance one reads this). The secrets I can’t keep are my own (when I was nearly 16, I came out to my parents one...
Taiwan 1969
My mother is an octopus. She collects our comic books, straightens collars, and slings bags across her narrow chest. She prods my brothers and me down the airplane aisle with her hard beak. Out in the squid inky Taipei night waits a grandfather we will meet for the first time. We must call him Waigong....
Revising with Lenses
An axiom from the world of sales: If you give someone two choices, they’ll probably pick one. If you give them three choices, they’ll say, “I have to think about it.” If you give them four choices, they’ll say, “Forget it, I’m fine with what I have.” Our point: Considering too much at once can...
‘Caught up in the Jaws’: Writing for Theme
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got about writing personal essays came from one of my MFA teachers, Susan Cheever, at Bennington College. “Write for theme,” she told us in workshop. “Not plot, theme.” Her lesson changed my life. Without a universal theme, personal essayists can end up writing anecdotes or catalogues...
Close Encounters of the Nonfiction Kind
In 1972, astronomer J. Allen Hynek published The UFO Experience, which included a classification system to describe three levels of “close encounters.” Though I am a skeptic regarding UFO sightings, Hynek’s scale intrigues me for what it suggests about how nonfiction writers might recognize promising subjects when they appear and encourage encounters of the deepest...
Getting Lost—and Found—in Personal Narrative
Getting lost is scary. As toddlers, my sister and I got separated from our parents in a giant store. I can still feel the verge-of-tears panic, the tightening of the throat. What if Mom and Dad abandoned us? What if strangers kidnapped us? That’s what’s frightening about getting lost, isn’t it? To be torn from...
Emotional Pacing: Lessons in Writing a Trauma Memoir
Writing a memoir about childhood familial trauma has taken me into fraught storytelling territory. The narrative centers on growing up in the shadow of my maternal aunt’s murder that took place when my mother was pregnant with me. She kept her sister’s murder a closely guarded secret throughout my childhood. This aunt was my mother’s...
Writing as a Doorway to the Unknown in Ourselves
Dante’s often-quoted beginning of the Divine Comedy has the narrator arriving at a dark wood, unsure of which way to turn. To many writers and artists, Dante’s predicament is a familiar, disquieting, and essential starting place. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I write to reveal not what I know, but what I don’t know.” And of an...
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