The Poetry of the Mundane
7 excuses you may use for not starting on your memoir: Excuse #1 '... but overall, my life is pretty ordinary' In my first year at a filmmaking school (long time ago) one of our first assignments was to capture the portrait of an individual. Most of us found...
The Pre-publishing Freedom of Writing – a guest post by Catherine
Kate Holden’s account of the changes that pursued her as a person and a writer following overnight literary success was fascinating as she spoke at the December Memoir Salon. At the outset of composing ‘In My Skin’, she wrote so...
Books for the Journey
The books in this evolving collection aim at presenting a variety of approaches to what has been named ‘life writing’. Their authors use tools of fiction to write a memoir, or work with ‘nonfictional’ approach to write a novel – either based on a (presumably) true story or on extensive research into social and political issues. Other authors may insert the ‘self’ into their research interest to create a hybrid memoir, while some memoirs are presented as graphic novels or poetry. As in all relevant writing, emotional truth is the force that drives each story.
The Dust of Uruzgan / Fred Smith
Fred Smith is no ordinary Australian diplomat. In postings served in the Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan, he built relationships with tribal leaders while continuing his side-career as a folk musician. Smith, who has written about his experiences in a book, The Dust...
Clownery / Paul hunter
"In his book “Memoir: An Introduction,” from 2011, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for “wisdom and self-knowledge,” for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned. Sometimes, though,...
No Friend but the Mountains / Behrouz Boochani
"In his astonishing book At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (1980), Jean Améry devotes a chapter to intellectuals in the Nazi camp. An essayist and novelist himself, he focuses on how writers made sense of their...
Go, Went, Gone / Jenny Erpenbeck
"Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent novel “Go, Went, Gone” (New Directions, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky) is about “the central moral question of our time,” and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very...
