Those of you who follow this blog know that I’m teaching an online memoir course.  I’m captivated by watching my students grapple with and write about the past.  Here are two passages for writers and anyone else who muses about the nature of memory, one from a novel and one from an essay, both beautiful and thought-provoking.

The first is from the narrator of the novel A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit.

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This week in the online memoir course I’m teaching, the students are working on characterization, both their own and that of others. We’re reading a chapter in Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington called “Writing about Living People,” in which she talks about how writers must come to their own decisions about their responsibilities to those whose lives are entwined with their own, and how one must balance the reasons for writing a story using real names against the harm that might be done to someone else.  I had thought this matter of what we owe people we write about … Read More

The cover of Minnesota writer Rachael Hanel’s memoir, We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, recently published by the University of Minnesota Press, is curiously upbeat, practically gay, with its jokey title in bright white, yellow, aqua, and salmon letterings. A better cover to my mind would have been a skull, for truly this book is a memento mori. Maybe the cover designer was a Minnesotan who, like the folks from rural Minnesota whom Hanel captures so knowingly, was afraid to face the real subject, death and its bride, grief. … Read More

All she knows about creative writing, that is . . .

Whether you’re writing memoir or fiction, advanced or beginner, this workshop on beautiful Madeline Island will help boost your writing to the next level!

August 19 – 23, at the Madeline Island School of the Arts — 715- 7474- 2054

For more information and to register, go to http://tinyurl.com/ce9uz8c

Hope to see you there –

Best,

Paulette

P.S.  Please forward this to anyone you know who might be interested. THANKS!

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On Monday I started teaching an online course on writing the book-length memoir for Stanford University Continuing Studies.  For the next 10 weeks my students and I will be thinking and talking (or I should say e-mailing) about writing memoir, including the question that the Watergate hearings posed so beautifully: “Where does the truth lie?” I’ve always enjoyed the double entendre of “lie” in that line.  How do the facts of the past and the truth get along? It’s clear that the facts do not produce the truth, not the emotional, psychological truth that the modern memoir demands.  But how … Read More

Emily Rapp was a creative writing student of mine at St. Olaf College in the early 1990s.  She was an unusually gifted writer even as an undergraduate, standing such head and shoulders above the other students that it was a given that she was headed for a successful career as a writer.  She was also lovely, a beautiful, vivacious redhead, delightful in every way to the extent that I knew her.  She had just about everything she needed already in place: a keen intelligence; a gift for language; a rich, complex sensibility; and a literary style and voice already well … Read More

I listened to a webinar this past week on shewrites.com by Guy Kawasaki, who is BIG right now for his (self-published) book (along with Shawn Welch) on self-publishing: APE:  Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur.  I found the talk superficial and simplistic but maybe you get what you pay for (it was free).  I can’t judge the book by a 30 minute webinar, but Kawasaki is one smart guy, “chief evangelist for Apple” (what does that mean?  Is that an actual job?), author of 12 books, including Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which was a … Read More

I don’t know about you, but I love a good obituary.  So you can imagine how I perked up when I saw this headline in the March 2^nd NYTimes: Sylvia Smith, 67, Memoirist of the Life Banal.

I know a thing or two myself about the life banal, but I’ve never considered it grist for the memoir mill.

I had to read on.

Sylvia Smith was not, apparently, an interesting person.  British, she dropped out of high school at 15, never married, “never had a great adventure or suffered a great misfortune, and never read books by … Read More

I have a book I want to recommend to you, dear readers, not that I read it myself. I SKIMMED it.  Looking for the good parts. And there were so many good parts I might as well have read it.  I didn’t have the time or patience (or concentration) to sit down and actually read it.  I’m reading other stuff, plus I’m constantly “marketing” The Answer to Your Question, which mainly consists of filling out forms with the same information over and over on online sites that announce free eBook giveaway days.  I have another one coming up, … Read More

I’ve been putting off writing a review of The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers’ novel about the Iraq war.  It was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and one of the The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2012.   I feel conflicted about it.  In some ways it is a stunning book; and yet by the end I felt it was seriously flawed. I feel both guilty and insecure about my assessment.  I see on the dust jacket the high praise it has garnered from writers like Alice Sebold, Colm Toibin, Anthony Swofford, and Philip Caputo.  A novel … Read More