I recently came across the following quote from German philosopher Karl Jaspers whose work influenced theology and psychology: Truth, he wrote, “only appears in time as a reality-through-communication. Abstracted from communication, truth hardens into an unreality.” For those of us who write from personal experience this means that our words supply the necessary blood, tissues, … Continue reading →
This week’s article is an excerpt from Rebecca McClanahan’s instructional book Write Your Heart Out: Exploring & Expressing What Matters To You, published by Walking Stick Press. This season, as we watch children in an environment where everything seems transformed, we re-experience the magic of childhood. Rebecca McClanahan’s thoughts and advice help us retrieve the … Continue reading →
I enjoy dipping into a collection of short fiction entitled You’ve Got To Read This as much for the pleasure of the fiction itself as for gathering new ideas about how to organize writing. There is something about the way short fiction writers tell stories that inspires the essay writer in me. When I opened … Continue reading →
Shortly after I posted the September 11, 2003 instructional exercise for Writing It Real, subscriber Christine Robinson sent me some writing of hers that resulted from using the exercise. In this week’s article, I want to show you what she wrote and how she developed the draft, which she thought resembled a prose poem, into … Continue reading →
Here is a sample scene from the novel-in-progress that David Beckman refers to in last week’s interview about being mentored in his writing. You will notice that he has made stylistic decisions in using sentence fragments to evoke the little boy Addison’s point of view. He also uses terminology of the time period he is … Continue reading →
As a writing instructor, it is always interesting to me to talk with other writers who teach. I enjoy hearing about the parts of the teaching process that excite them. This past June, I had the opportunity to talk over breakfast with New York writer Janice Eidus. She said: When I guide writers in their … Continue reading →
Not scheduled for release until January 2004, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, an epistolary novel by Elisabeth Robinson, has already received excellent reviews. If you are developing a wish list for holiday gifts, I recommend putting this book on that list. It is a pleasurable read, by turns hilarious and poignant, … Continue reading →
At the May 2003 Book Expo America in Los Angeles, Joni Cole handed out advance copies of an exciting book, eventually released this September. Joni is a freelance writer with a Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College with a focus on fiction. It is second nature for her to imagine and create … Continue reading →
Although it might not be obvious, those of us who write personal essays can benefit greatly from not knowing what we have to write about. That is surprising to people who think of the essay as researched knowledge with a professorial, didactic tone. But to write an essay is really to “assay” or test out … Continue reading →
Every Labor Day Weekend at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival held at Seattle Center, Jerome (Jerry to his friends) Gold mans a Black Heron Press booth at the festival’s book fair. In April of each year, he mans the booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and also at the May Book Expo America … Continue reading →
Lately, I’ve read a book of Buddhist wisdom by Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, poetry by the Northwest’s James Bertolino, essays by the Northeast’s Philip Simmons and memoirs by the Southwest’s Laurence Shames and by Timothy Doyle, who has lived in India for years. In each of the author’s performances, I am reminded that when … Continue reading →
I met Joelle Fraser at the 2003 Whidbey Island Writer’s Conference, where we both presented. Her book The Territory of Men intrigued me. Sherman Alexie (author of The Toughest Indian in the World), and Beverly Donofrio (author of Riding in Cars with Boys) both blurbed the book saying it is written with honesty and is … Continue reading →
Robyn Conley and I met at a time when we both had books on journaling newly out from Walking Stick Press. Robyn’s role at the Society of Southwestern Authors‘ conference we taught at involved individual editing sessions with conference participants. Her skills as a book doctor involve sentence editing for grammar and punctuation as well … Continue reading →
On this September 11, two years after the tragedy at the World Trade Centers in NY, many of us who write believe more whole heartedly than ever that getting our words on the page makes a difference in our lives and in the lives of those who read our words. The World Trade Centers tragedy … Continue reading →
Those of us who write from personal experience often think that we’d like to share life lessons and delights in the form of literature for children. Excited by our desire to write, we also feel in touch with the child in ourselves who loves learning and has a need to know. But when it comes … Continue reading →
I have been in correspondence with a grand dame of Australian Poetry. I met Doris Leadbetter in 2002, when she and her husband Richard spent their winter holiday (our summertime) away from Melbourne attending writers’ conferences in the US and visiting Richard’s home state of Montana. All of us at the Colorado Mt. Writers’ Workshop … Continue reading →
“Poetry is a form of necessary speech,” Edward Hirsch writes in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and “poems strike something deeper than thought itself…experience that takes us to the very heart of being.” Over the months, subscribers have sent results from exercises in Writing It Real, exercises meant to … Continue reading →
After posting last week’s interview about Steven Winn’s ideas for finding contacts on the publishing scene, I am pleased to reprint his wonderful essay about a spring day during a most difficult passage in his life. The essay originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Father’s Day 2002 under the headline “Good Day at … Continue reading →
The Sunday July 20, 2003 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle was proud to report that its journalists are serving the Bay Area community well. Arts and culture critic Steven Winn was among four Chronicle writers who placed in the 15th annual American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors’ Excellence in Writing contest. This marks … Continue reading →
At Yourdictionary.com, linguists maintain a page about word definitions and histories. I signed up on the web to have these words and stories about their usage emailed to me each day. Some of the words are ones that I’ve never heard or even read. Others are words I use everyday and never think about. After … Continue reading →
As the creator and director of Poets & Writers’ Publishing Seminars Program, Amy Holman addresses the needs of writers (including herself). She teaches writers what they need to know about matching their work with the right editors and agents. In a recent email interview, Amy described the goals and successes of the publishing seminars program. … Continue reading →
Caroline Arnold, who has published over 100 nonfiction books for children, is a pro at finding information on sophisticated topics and making it fit the page limits set by her publishers. To do this she uses captions, sidebars, glossaries, charts and maps, time lines, and lists of resources for further reading as well as authors’ … Continue reading →
On my vacation this year along the shores of Lake Michigan, I was reading the last chapters of an advance reading copy of The Dogs of Babel on the day it appeared in bookstores across America. Little, Brown and Company introduced the book at this year’s Book Expo America to stimulate interest among booksellers, and … Continue reading →
Meg Files enjoys researching and uses what she learns to set her stories and to inform her characters. In the excerpt below, 19-year-old Hanna accompanies her father, who is researching for a magazine feature article, on a car trip to a Western rendezvous. Using modern characters with an interest in traditions of the West, Meg … Continue reading →
Last week you read an article by Susan Bono on the personal essay–writing them, teaching them, and starting a magazine for publishing them. This week’s article is a personal essay by Susan Bono, which appears in the anthology Saltwater, Sweetwater–Women Write from California‘s North Coast, Floreant Press, 1997. You will see why this essay, rich … Continue reading →
A couple of years ago, I began receiving Tiny Lights, a publication out of Northern California that is dedicated to the personal essay. I was struck by the caliber of the essays in each issue and contacted the publisher of the journal to find out more about her publishing vision and dedication to the genre. … Continue reading →
When I was writing monthly poetry writing columns for Writer’s Digest Magazine, I created strategies for writing poetry that utilized as a jumping off place the topical thoughts our culture promotes each month. I wanted to help those who wanted to write poetry liberate themselves from the influence of the advertising buzz and Hallmark card … Continue reading →
This essay first appeared in slightly different form in The Diarist’s Journal, Volume II, Issue #2 The first week of my first graduate poetry-writing workshop at the University of Washington, our teacher William Matthews came to class in paint-stained clothes. A new arrival at the University, he was just moving into his house on Seattle’s … Continue reading →
When my daughter told me to read a personal essay in her school’s alumni magazine, I did. I enjoy finding the many places personal essays inhabit and I appreciate their great value. In this case, Stanford sophomore Sheena Chestnut wrote a narrative about using a personal story to help others learn a sophisticated use of … Continue reading →
I had lunch recently with novelist and screenwriter Robert Morgan Fisher, who supervises the online screenwriting program at Writer’s Boot Camp (WBC) in Santa Monica, CA. His first novel, called Set the Poem Free, won 2nd place in the 2000 Publishing Online North American Fiction Open. He was awarded $5,000 and briefly published online. The … Continue reading →
The Diarist’s Journal is published three times a year in February, June and October by Hollie Rose. The publication is a rich and lively discussion of journaling, diary keeping, and the community surrounding it. The journal is calling for submissions of reviews of diary-form novels as well as opinion pieces on keeping diaries for publication, … Continue reading →
Novelist and poet Meg Files recently spoke on a panel at the Associated Writing Program’s annual meeting. She talked about researching for writing her novels. After her talk, Meg and I conducted an email interview about how her research affects her writing, her imagination, and her teaching. What research did you do for your first … Continue reading →
When Karen Rippstein wrote to me that she wanted my help in shaping a poem from a prose piece she had written about a specific Christmas with her daughter, I was intrigued. Most of the people I’ve worked with bring poems or essays and want to stick with the genre while revising. But after writing … Continue reading →
As I prepare the following interview with Sebastian Matthews, I’m thinking of an encounter I had at a workshop I co-taught for teachers early this spring at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District. An administrator for the Peer Assistance program smiled broadly after hugging one of the attending teachers hello. She turned … Continue reading →
Poet Stanley Plumly, a teacher of mine, used to say that poems must weigh more at the end than at the beginning. What matters to us has emotional weight, and as with poetry, the personal essay supplies a vehicle for writers to find out what matters and to feel the weight of what matters. As … Continue reading →
Personal essayists, poets and memoir writers face many questions about making personal truths public. In the following essay, author Migael Scherer evokes the effects on her readers as well as on herself of her writing about painful truth. Even as she is about to accept a distinguished award, she must brace herself for the dissonance … Continue reading →
When writing moves us to struggle against a taboo, especially one that demands silence, we can expect powerful resistance. It is natural to feel alone, even besieged. The resistance to our words comes both from ourselves and from others. If we respect the struggle of our readers to understand with us, so also may come … Continue reading →
If March comes in like a lion, they say, it’ll go out like a lamb and vise versa. I’d like to combine this notion with an idea that Keats termed “negative capability.” He said that a good poem holds within it one thing as well as its opposite. For example, when we eulogize someone’s death, … Continue reading →
After our initial correspondence, posted on 12/12/02, author Janice Eidus answered some more questions I posed based on what she’d written to me. I am delighted to share the continuation of our correspondence this week: When you do decide to write an essay, are you exploring issues that are the same or different than the … Continue reading →
In our interview with her on 12/12/02, Janice Eidus says, “But there I was, years later, writing about a tough-cookie, teased-hair girl from the Bronx, modeled on the older Italian girls in my neighborhood who had seemed so exotic and fascinating to me, so far removed from my own Jewish, politically progressive household. And I … Continue reading →
Ok, you asked what I’ve learned that I might want to pass on to those who Meg Leder was the Writer’s Digest editor who worked with me on Keeping a Journal You Love and A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery. Recently, she made a career move and left Cincinnati and Writer’s Digest Books … Continue reading →
About 1020 words In these days just before Valentine’s Day, it seems as if every shop window, radio and TV commercial has turned the volume up on love. “Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget,” whether the one you love is spouse, partner, grandchild, parent or pet, you must tell the one you love — by … Continue reading →
When fiction writer Janice Eidus (see the From Our Correspondents article of 12/12/02) introduced me to the work of nonfiction writer Sue William Silverman, I knew I wanted to find out what she had to say on memoir writing. After I read both of her memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You and … Continue reading →
Sheila Bender, July Poetry Column, 1295 words When an author repeats the same word or words at the beginning of a series of sentences the technique is called “anaphora.” In Greek, it means “a carrying up or back.” With repetitions, words gather power and resonance. Anaphora offers an organizing strategy, which allows for deepening of … Continue reading →
Category: Instructional Exercises So many times we find that what we are writing sounds dry and dull compared to what we wish to be writing or what we admire in other’s writing. “How can we make our work matter?” we ask ourselves, “How can we endow our writing with richer more resonate meaning?” Or sometimes … Continue reading →
When my daughter was 14 months old, we lived in Seattle, and she and I spent a cold, cloudy winter afternoon at the Woodland Park Zoo. Her favorite animals were the uncaged pigeons she realized she could send into flight by running towards them. A day later when we saw the newspaper’s front page, we … Continue reading →
Writing Poetry Through Storms and Showers “You have helped me learn how to write a poem. You have taught me how to shape an essay. But I’m not sure about how to get something published. How do I publish my work?” “If an editor sends my poems or essays back without comments, how can I … Continue reading →