Archive for the ‘Creative Nonfiction’ Category
Friday, March 11th, 2011
….winner of the Edna Award for Creative Nonfiction from The New Quarterly. I was the judge. The award was presented last night in Toronto. I guarantee that Heather’s piece, “The Mr. Shredder Man,” will make you laugh even as it shreds your heart. It’s wry, wise, and beautifully wrought. You can find it in The New Quarterly Xtra.
My task was to pick just one winner from a selection of thirteen of the best nonfiction pieces published in the previous year. I had a hard time narrowing the field. So congratulations also to The New Quarterly’s many wonderful nonfiction contributors, and to editor Kim Jernigan, for consistently publishing such interesting work.
Tags: Awards, Creative Nonfiction, Literary Journals
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Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
Hardworking Melissa Krone of The New Quarterly must have thought I was the rudest writer on their rosters; she kept sending emails asking to interview me and I kept “ignoring” her. The culprit was my spam filter. But at last we connected, and she’s posted an interview we did at The Literary Type and on The New Quarterly’s website. Thanks, Melissa, for your thought-provoking questions and for the opportunity to share my thoughts.
There’s still time to enter The New Quarterly’s annual contests: details on their site.
Tags: Contests, Essays, Interviews
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Monday, January 10th, 2011
Four memoirists weigh in on writing the personal essay, at the New York Times.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memoirs
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Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Here’s an online quarterly that celebrates the personal essay, publishing classics side by side with new work on a given theme. The name pays reference to the essay’s rambling, roundabout path. For an upcoming issue, the editor would like essays on the theme of “quiet.”
Thanks to Joanne Epp for this link.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Journals
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Monday, November 22nd, 2010
Here’s a terrific exploration of the essayistic “I” from Carl H. Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction program and author of The Made Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay. A sample:
“In some sense, of course, the voice in a personal essay does put one in connection with its author, more directly and closely than any other form of writing, except a personal letter. But the nature of that connection is inherently so tangled and indefinite, so variable from one essay or essayist to the next, that despite the inclination of Oates and others to talk about “authentic voice,” one cannot substantiate the connection beyond asserting that it exists. To determine the authenticity of an essayist’s voice, one would have to know as much about that essayist’s inner life, public behavior, and personal experience as the essayist herself. Yet the temptation to equate essayists with their essayistic selves is seemingly irrepressible.
How else to account for a friend’s response to my new book: “Your essays sound just like you! You’re there in every one of them.” Which me? I wondered. The academic me? The confessional me? The whimsical me? Or one of the others I contrived, figuring that a book about the made-up self ought to embody a few of my own. I had created so many different voices that I decided my friend must have been joking—or paying tribute to my protean “I.” On the other hand, when my partner, Jackie, finished reading the book, she exclaimed, “I sure wish you could talk like that.” Which me? I wondered once again.”
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Essayists, Essays
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