The Poetry of the Mundane

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...
The Dust of Uruzgan / Fred Smith

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

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,...
Go, Went, Gone / Jenny Erpenbeck

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...