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Emphasizing structure
Teaching form—first!—in memoirs, essays & creative nonfiction. [Barrington’s short classic.]I suppose like all writing teachers, I try to emulate certain teachers. But mostly I’m trying to be the...
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Bird nerd
[Now: Helen Macdonald recently with a raptor. Photo from The Times, UK.] Review: readers flock to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk memoir for its savory braided structure, intense immersion, poetic...
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Atoka Gold, Dad’s bull
[My father bred and registered this young bull; the photo was taken about 1954, a year before my birth on the ranch.] A cane prods me to conjure Dad’s ranch days in a memoir essay. Essays and stories...
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Honesty in memoir, ver. 4.0
Gornick’s memoir illumes the divide between fiction & nonfiction. [Vivian as a girl with her Ma.]What’s the difference, in reading experience, between fiction and nonfiction? Between reading a...
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Sentence, substance & comma joy
Savoring James Baldwin’s “Native Son” for style & content. There’s only two kinds of truth. Let’s get it straight from the start. It’s all what you believe in your head and your heart.—Van...
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Doubt confronts faith
Trials of the Monkey a fine personal & reported stealth memoir. Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir by Matthew Chapman. Picador, 367 pp. Some of us miss the personal dimension in nonfiction...
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A story structured in shards
[Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, giving a White House tour.] Portman & a film’s braided structure give an icon her human due. God isn’t interested in stories. He’s interested in the truth.—a...
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Making Notting Hill’s long list
[U.S. war fleet, the Pacific, WWII. My father flew bombers in that theatre.] Revising an essay about Dad’s prize bull, my wife’s hurt foot. A year and a half ago here, I wrote about my excitement at...
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Pain’s parallel kingdom
Sonya Huber discusses her memoir Pain Woman Takes Your Keys Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays From a Nervous System by Sonya Huber. University of Nebraska Press, 177 pages We are primitive in...
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My grandfather’s essay
Telling the story of how a wild toddler broke & remade me one day. [When Kiki fed Kathy last year.]Driving back and forth between Ohio and Virginia late last winter and into this spring, as I...
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