August 31st, 2010
If I’ve been sadly absent here—and I have been—it’s partly because this summer I’ve been extremely busy putting together the content for Kingston WritersFest’s web site. More than sixty-three authors are coming to share their work with us this season, including novelists Steven Heighton, Lisa Moore, Joan Thomas, Kathleen Winter, and Michael Winter; memoirists Karen Connelly and Iain Reid, and poets Joanne Page and John Steffler. Find the complete list on our Authors Page.
One of the perks of my job was that in composing profiles for each of our authors I got to know quite a lot about them and their upcoming books, as well as their reading habits. Fascinating stuff.
I’ll be appearing at Kingston WritersFest as moderator of an event called In Search of Memory, a conversation with Judy Fong Bates about her beautiful memoir, The Year of Finding Memory. I loved Judy’s novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café, and I’m just about to dive into the memoir now. Tickets to this event, and all others, are available at the Grand Theatre Box Office. Prices are very reasonable, but tickets are selling fast, so get yours soon!
Those of you who love to write should check out the Writers Studio—ten master classes with some of Canada’s best writers. I plan to attend as many of these as I can get into!
If you’re in Kingston or anywhere near it in late September, join us!
Tags: Appearances, Kingston WritersFest
Posted in Appearances | No Comments »
July 18th, 2010
“Often when I read examples of what purport to be lyric essays, I …find them resembling a certain kind of experimental poetry that has proliferated for at least forty years…There tends to be a reliance on structural, conceptual devices, such as lists or repeating word-phrases, a welcoming of stream-of-conscious, surrealist disjunctive leaps from line to line, and a suppression of mounting argument, replaced by circularity or trance… “
—Phillip Lopate
Tags: Essayists, Essays
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Essayists, Essays, Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay | No Comments »
July 5th, 2010
Lyric Essay
Words that go with the lyric essay include fragments, collage, mosaic, white space, juxtaposition, braided narratives, heightened attention to language.
Deborah Tall and John D’Agata:
The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention. It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. It often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically, its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.
Tags: Essayists, Essays
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Essayists, Essays, Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay | No Comments »
June 26th, 2010
A lovely and unexpected commendation from Nathalie Foy at Books on Books. (Unexpected because it occurs in the midst of her review of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.)
“One of my favourite books of the past year is Susan Olding’s Pathologies: A Life in Essays. She takes the personal essay to new places, puts it to interesting uses, gives it a fresh shape. It is Olding’s form that is so often the reward of reading her essays. They are fresh and startling and often biting. I like that.”
Thank you, Nathalie. And thank you also for the inspired decision to focus on books about books in your blog.
Tags: Blogs, Praise
Posted in Blogs, Essays, Memoir, Women and Writing | No Comments »
June 15th, 2010
Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds
“A loose sally of the mind. An irregular, undigested piece.” (Samuel Johnson, himself an essayist.)
Known for its perambulating, meandering, (seemingly) artless construction.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Samuel Johnson
Posted in Essayists, Essays, Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay | No Comments »
