Tell the Story
Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, is the kind of book one might buy, as I did, at the beginning of a nonfiction project. It is a guidebook to the variety of material that falls under the heading “creative nonfiction” and a collection of questions and writing […]
read morePhillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay is another big book that has been untouched on a shelf until recently. The class-syllabus-esque subtitle, “An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present,” made it easy for me to pass by it on my way to, say, The Liar’s Club. This was an error in […]
read moreThe picture of this book, Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, doesn’t do it justice. At 2.5″ thick, and 1284 pages, it’s pretty daunting. After my less than scholarly foray into Boswell territory, how to approach Montaigne? I chose four essays to read with the help of Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, […]
read moreFirst, two confessions: if I were making my reading list today, I would not include James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. I would include in its (pre-1900, evolution-of-the-genre) place, say, the work of St. Augustine, Anne Bradstreet, Benvenuto Cellini, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Margery Kempe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, St. Teresa […]
read moreI've had Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories on my bookshelf for over a year. I don't know why I haven't read it until now, but if you haven't read it either, please do, and as soon as possible. Hampl sprinkles her clarifying tonic on memoir, memory, and writing process through essays on poetry […]
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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?
