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Tag: memoir
WTP Writer: John Skoyles
“I think of myself as a poet who writes in other genres.” Interview by August Smith, WTP Feature Writer John Skoyles has published six books of poems, most recently, Inside Job and Suddenly It’s Evening: Selected Poems. His autobiographical novel, A Moveable Famine: A Life in Poetry, was published in 2014. His work has appeared in…
Site Review: Talking Writing
“Creating meaning through personal stories.” By Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Talking Writing, an online literary journal spearheaded by Martha Nichols and Jennifer Jean, aims to provide a home for first-person journalism. Defined on their “About” page as “features told from a personal perspective but underpinned by research and reporting,” first-person journalism, the editors claim, is an…
Site Review: LitReactor
Gaming the Workshop by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor The team behind LitReactor, a literary website that offers online classes and writers’ workshops, a features magazine, a podcast, and a Reddit-esque community chatroom, doesn’t shy away from bold claims. On their about page, they boast: “If you’re passionate about reading and/or writing, this is the only website…
WTP Writer: Stephen Davenport
“I’m in a hurry—which is a great way to live.” Interview by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Stephen Davenport has taught and coached in both day and boarding schools and has been the head of The Country School in Madison, Connecticut and of The Athenian School in Danville, California. Davenport draws on his long experience of working…
Dusting Off. Moving Forward.
Chris Offutt’s writing advice resonates as America regroups By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Cast a cold Eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by. —tombstone of W.B. Yeats When Chris Offutt was ten, growing up in an Appalachian backwater, he asked a librarian for a book on baseball. She gave him J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in…
WTP Writer: Charlotte Holmes
Into the Grass Labyrinth Interview by Emily Jaeger, Features Editor Charlotte Holmes is a writer, a poet, and a teacher of creative writing. Her first book, Gifts and Other Stories, was published in 1994. Published by BkMk Press in 2016, her new collection of stories, The Grass Labyrinth, has been hailed as “a contemporary classic.” Holmes received…
WTP Writer: Beth Kephart
Handling the Truth by Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of over 20 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir for teens and adults. She is a partner in Juncture Workshops and a professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching…
Latest Read: Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart
The Medium and its Messenger by Richard Gilbert Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir by Beth Kephart. Gotham Books, 254 pp. Here’s three good reasons to read Beth Kephart’s book on writing memoir: her lapidary prose; her vision of memoir as an instrument of inquiry and transcendence; and her superb annotated list of recommended…
Information vs. Emotion in Memoir
Writing about Dreams, Loss, Fatherhood & Farming By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor One fall day, I sat down to write about my family’s experiences in Appalachian Ohio, where we lived and worked and were part-time farmers for thirteen years. It took me a year and a half to produce a manuscript of 500 pages. It took me…
Review: Dani Shapiro's Still Writing
Memoir: the Personal vs. the Universal By Contributing Editor Richard Gilbert “Demons haunt your pages because they already exist.”—Dani Shapiro “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”—Henry David Thoreau Neat sentiment, Henry David, and it seems apt for writer Dani Shapiro, who has…
Writing—an elusive art of wisps and webs
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]riting is such an elusive art. Writers are often cagey about the origin of their creations when asked where the story started. Not every story is explainable. There are the kinds that start with a wisp of an idea, which is flushed out after years of research. Other stories draw the writer into its web,…