Tell the Story
My thesis manuscript readers said that if they lived in Ohio, say, instead of Miami, they would not have a clear enough idea of the different parts of south Florida in which I have lived over the past 12 years. Each neighborhood, each city, each zip code, has its own distinct personality, flavor, vibe, and […]
read moreI’ve been reading, practicing really, Natalie Goldberg since I was in graduate school the first time, writing bits of my dissertation in a coffee shop Writing Down the Bones-style. I read Old Friend from Far Away in 2008, writing the first draft of my MFA thesis. As Lee Gutkind blurbs, “If you are a new […]
read moreI like Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History for what it accomplishes–an ambitious cataloging of memoir from the beginning of the genre, with offshoots and subcategories, and examinations of the difficulties of navigating memory and truth. For my purposes, which lately have been to teach myself about memoir and place my own writing within it, it […]
read moreWriting Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and insights from the teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard, has the same textbook-y feeling of other neglected books on my sagging shelves. It is also similarly a shame that I am just now digging into it. It’s divided into three sections: I. The […]
read moreKeep it Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind (aka the godfather behind creative nonfiction and the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction), is a slim, practical guidebook as the title suggests. It covers a lot of ground that the other books I’ve discussed […]
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For years I kept secrets in silence. Then, once upon a time, I spoke and wrote them to a handful of people and began to blog anonymously. Today I tell my stories face-to-face, online, and in a memoir coming soon. Telling our stories leads to freedom, empowerment, and growth, for both the teller and the told. Is today your once upon a time, your time to tell your story?
