Category: Rick Skwiot
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A novelist comes alive in a memoir, or is it the other way around?
Life is struggle, for everyone, and those who have the inner resources and high spirits to fight on in the face of great adversity are those we most admire. Like you, I want to hear their stories, not the stories of quitters, pessimists and whiners. The protagonists don’t have to succeed in reaching their goals,…
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How does it feel to write a book? Tenacity of a writer.
My more mature self certainly felt nostalgic, but the strongest feeling was the sensation that I had left behind another unlived life–that there was another man there and then and another river, which he chose not to wade into. It makes one wonder about the roads not taken, a very bittersweet sensation, but also, for…
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A Memoirist Talks About the Backstory of His Memoir
I don’t think I consciously crafted a self-portrait here. I was just trying to report on this guy who went to Mexico and found himself, and how that came about. For most any memoirist, there are two first-person characters: the author/narrator who is writing it and the historical character who experienced the events in the…
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Turning Journals and Notebooks Into a Memoir
Rick Skwiot: My journals were crucial in my development as a writer. Not only did I record events of my life, but I also, as you suggest, wrote fictional scenes there, experimented with writing styles, penned criticism on the books I was reading, recorded my dreams and more. It was a mishmash of fact and…
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Spiritual memoirs, interview with author Rick Skwiot
His quest was somewhere between the fast living of Henry Miller and the soul searching of Somerset Maugham, and contained some of the elements of my own travels. It’s too late to interview Maugham, Miller, or the other world travelers who haunted my imagination during my formative years. But Rick Swiot is alive and willing…
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