The blank screen. The blinking cursor. The sudden, irresistible urge to dig out that last chocolate bar from the Halloween stash in the back of the pantry. Writer’s block can take a lot of forms, but it still plays the same old tune, a tick-tock insinuation that maybe, this time, the words are really gone.…
Category: Articles
The Writing Life: Revising by William Henderson
Revision. The idea of revision is interesting, especially in terms of revising a memoir, because I have to decide which moments from my life, from the year covered in the book, should stay and which moments should go.
Craft: Habits by Donna Steiner
I spoke with some young writers yesterday. They happen to be poets, and had just read a couple of chapters from The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser. We were talking about establishing good writing habits, and one student said, “I always make sure it’s quiet where I’m writing, and I try to make…
The Writing Life: the unruled page by mensah demary
i allow myself many vices: cigarettes, more cigarettes, various Apple products [my apartment is wired to Apple’s hive mind], and Moleskine journals. while i don’t believe in the so-called “writing life,” there is value in journaling one’s thoughts. i guess. still, i buy Moleskines because somewhere in my reptile brain, a $17 journal makes me more of a writer than, say, a $0.99 notebook from Walgreens.
Review — Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg
In 2005, Avi Steinberg did what any Harvard-educated, obituary-writing, non-practicing Orthodox Jew would do at a crossroads in his life: he took a job as a prison librarian with the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston.
The Writing Life: Tastes by Hilary Meyerson
I’ve been involved in a love triangle for almost twenty years. My two loves have never met, but the time is coming. My first love is the man with whom I’ve shared my public and private life; the other is my writing, a more private love. One would think they would be easy to introduce, but I have not found it so.
Craft: So What? by Risa Nye
A couple of years ago, a writer friend of mine told me about one of his old high school English teachers who owned a lethal pair of personalized rubber stamps. One read “So what?” and the other, “Who cares?” Ouch… Harsh? Perhaps.
Review — Confessions of a Left-Handed Man (An Artist’s Memoir) by Peter Selgin
In his collection of essays, Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, Peter Selgin unabashedly delves into some of the most intimate and often humiliating moments of his left-handed life. Selgin’s essays describe the difficulty of being a first-generation Italian-American twin in a small hat factory town in Connecticut.
Interview: Linda Joy Myers, President and Founder of National Association of Memoir Writers
There is a wide divide between reality and remembering, and the memoirist is often left alone in his or her struggle to straddle that gap.
That’s why organizations such as the National Association of Memoir Writers, or NAMW, are so vital to a memoirist’s world. It’s the most important thing you can do for yourself as a writer: surround yourself with other writers. And for memoirists in particular, it’s often therapeutic to meet and converse with others who are facing the same challenges.
Writing Life: Twitter Me This, by Lisa Ahn
Twitter is the consummate writer’s salon. Like the salons of old, it is a forum for the exchange of ideas. That alone is a boon to writers – the ebb and flow of “why” and “how.” Politics, philosophy, science, religion and gossip intersect in the slipstream, the crisscrossing currents. Between the spoken and implied, we discover characters to hatch, plots to ripen, settings to evolve. The daily unfolding of millions of lives is a trove awaiting plunder.
