Posts Tagged ‘Creative Nonfiction’
Visual Images and the Writing of Narrative
Visual images can often suggest narratives. Such is the case with the one that opens this post, a photograph of a pair of hot pink stilettos lying the tall grass. How did they get there? Who was wearing them, or were they wearing them? Where were they going? What happened when they got there? Did…
Read MoreA Message Box: Objects and Memoirs
Because my father was a farmer, we barely knew what it was to take a vacation. There were crops to tend and livestock to feed, and God forbid our cattle got out of their pasture, as they sometimes did, and we weren’t there to corral them. All through my childhood, I only remember us going…
Read MoreThe Marks We Leave Behind: A Writing Exercise for Memoirists
After my father died, I found the marks he’d left: the wooden handles of tools, scraped and splintered from the pincers of his prosthetic hands—his hooks as he always called them; the clamped edges of pages in his Bible from where he’d held them. I can still recall him sitting at our dining table, working…
Read MoreMemoir and the Imagination
My wife Cathy has told me it’s all right if I tell this story. It’s her story of never knowing, until recently, the identity of her biological father. Her mother, a few years before she died, finally, when pressed, gave Cathy the identity of her father. He was deceased, but Cathy had no reason to…
Read MoreI’m Mr. Blue: Thoughts on Writing Essays
It’s Christmas night, and I’m in the backseat of my parents’ Chevrolet Belair or the Ford that preceded it, or else riding between them in the cab of my father’s Chevy pickup, and I’m four, or five, or six, or seven, and we’re coming home from another Christmas spent with my mother’s side of the…
Read MoreMad Libs for Creative Nonfiction Writers
Cathy and I, the past few years, have been opening our home on Thanksgiving Day, providing a welcome table to anyone who might need a place to go. Of course, we’re disappointed that the pandemic has made that impossible this year, but our gathering’s loss is a small price to pay for the sake of…
Read MoreKeep Going: The Writing Life and Perseverance
It’s a really windy day here in central Ohio, and consequently there’s a lot of noise—the sound of the wind, the jangle of wind chimes, the creaking of siding on my house. When I was running into that wind in the last of my five miles, it was hard to keep going. The gusts…
Read MoreWhat We Know, What We Don’t: Persona in Memoir
There’s a point in Sue William Silverman’s new memoir, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, where she’s writing about getting a phone call from her doctor, telling her she has an E. coli infection in her bladder. He prescribes the antibiotic, Macrobid. For Sue, who readily admits her hypochondria, the idea of taking the…
Read MoreStorytelling in Creative Nonfiction
I’ve always valued narrative as a way of thinking on the page. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I’ve always embraced story as a useful strategy for discovering what I think and feel and for learning what I’ve come to the page to say, as well as a means for practicing the art of empathy. It…
Read MoreTime and Narrative in Memoir
When it comes to writing memoir, we can never give full expression to an entire life. We have too much from which to choose—too much time, too many moments, too many characters, too many questions. We can, though, find a narrative arc that, if handled skillfully, will contain more of the past, the present, and…
Read More