Memoir
Excerpt from Tom Titus’ Memoir
Dr. Tom A. Titus is author of the memoir Blackberries in July: A Forager’s Field Guide to Inner Peace, a year-long chronology of old orchards, bay clams, wild mushrooms, and spawning salmon, a hunting and gathering of his spirit that became a reunion with the land and the traditions of four generations. Tom is a research [...]
Excerpt from Liz Stephens’ New Memoir
Liz Stephens holds a PhD in creative nonfiction. A winner of the Western Literature Association’s Frederick Manfred Award and a finalist for the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Western American Literature, and South Dakota Review. The following excerpts are from The Days Are Gods by Liz Stephens by permission [...]
Review of The Days Are Gods
Home Is Where Your Words Take You—and Keep Taking You By Geri Lipschultz With her own twist, Liz Stephens joins fellow writers Terry Tempest Williams and Cheryl Strayed on the trail of women writing the American West. In this fine debut memoir—wrought in language that is witty, melodic, and wise—Stephens insinuates herself among the landscape [...]
Of Labor and Literature
Do Good Fences Make Good Writers? By Jeffrey Abrahams With January’s chill, I am reminded of an experience in Iowa City while a Workshop student that has stuck with me for more than 35 years. Vance Bourjaily, the celebrated novelist and long-time teacher at the Workshop had badly injured his foot while working at his [...]
Musing on Halloween
Cinderella Crone in Liminal Space By Geri Lipschultz In my Critical Theory class at Ohio University where I had gone to pursue my doctorate, we were knee deep in the construct of the carnivalesque as identified by the Russian theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. We’d read chapters of his book on Rabelais where Bakhtin examines [...]
Excerpt from Joy Harjo’s New Memoir
It took Joy 14 years to write her new memoir. Revisiting the hard stuff can take a while. Sooooooo worth the wait! We recommend reading it with one of her CDs playing in the background, the more sax riffs the better. And potatoes frying in the skillet. From CRAZY BRAVE: A Memoir by Joy Harjo. [...]
A Reluctant Writer
Rebelling Against the Self By Ginger Moran Ginger Moran is a teacher, published writer and single mom of two boys. Her areas of expertise are in fiction and creative nonfiction writing, editing, and creative survival. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in [...]
On Memorial Day
My Father, Toilet Paper, and Italian Opera By Eric Olsen This piece was originally posted at this time last year, to enthusiastic response. Some of my earliest memories concern my father neatly folding toilet paper and tucking it into his shirt pocket before leaving the house. Also my father now and then breaking spontaneously into Italian, [...]
Vance Bourjaily Remembered
Writing in the Wilderness By Geri Lipschultz “You know, you’re a good writer,” Vance said. I was hanging on that. He went on a little, about how good I was. I forget that part. It was a long time ago, but this conversation has its place in my arsenal. For some reason that I could [...]
How Strong Is YOUR Urge to Write?
Blind Ambition By Jeffrey Abrahams On the morning of October 3, I woke up blind. Well, semi-blind. I could function well enough to get to work, struggle at the computer all day, and continually tell myself that the schmear of schmutz that blanketed my left eye would simply go away. But by the next day [...]
Recent Comments & Links