Category: Philadelphia Regional
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Magazine Writer To Personal Historian, Pt2
When the book arrived, she had a big party. I know people who do legacy videos, which are nice. But there’s nothing like holding a book – a book about your life – in your hands. Everyone deserves their 15 minutes of fame. But when it comes in printed form, it will last a lifetime.
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Magazine Writer To Personal Historian, Pt1
Most of the work of writing a memoir is about the introspective aspect of figuring out how all those events fit into the emotional dynamics of a person’s life. How did you capture this “vicarious introspection” – what did it feel like to search through another person’s memory and look for structure?
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What Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Means to Memoir Writers
I look back across the decades and see how one thing led to another. The Creative Nonfiction genre, referred to by its abbreviation CNF, is now so widely respected it runs like a river through the literary landscape. And the memoir wave flows into and through it, fed by the individuals who share their nonfiction…
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Philadelphia Push To Publish, Lessons in Courage from a Writing Conference
Funderburg went on to read a passage from her recently published memoir, which I have not yet had an opportunity to read, called “Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home: A Memoir.” It’s about discovering her relationship with her father while he was dying of cancer. The passage was rich in imagery,…
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Fiction built on a foundation of real life
Fiction seems entirely different from memoirs. And yet, when I carefully compare the two forms, I discover they are intimately connected, each breathing life into the other. A good memoir is more than just a raw dump of facts. It generates dramatic tension by using fiction techniques like suspense and character development. And the support…
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A Healthy Community Needs a Healthy Writer’s Group
A regional writing group in which I participate recently asked me to contribute to an application for a 501c3 status as a non-profit community organization. Since this is a topic about which I have been passionate for years, I had a number of ideas, that I had never written them all down in one place.…
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My Day at a Writer’s Conference – or – The Benefits of Showing Up
The keynote speech turned out to be invigorating and freeing. Beth Kephart, whose work I did not know, started as a memoir writer, who, as her career proceeded, extended her writing to other forms, most recently winning awards as a young adult novelist. As her writing skills and interests develop, Beth follows her creative compulsion…
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Reach deep into memory to build a scene
The best way to share my nerdiness is to show scenes, bringing readers into the halls of my high school to see for themselves. And yet when I try to describe my life in high school, I feel like I’m trying to peer into the hidden memories of a stranger. Who was that guy? Fortunately,…
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