Archive for the ‘Essayists’ Category
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Thanks to Shawna Lemay for the link to this article, “Literary Haunts,” in The Independent, written by Woolf’s great-niece, Emma Woolf:
“In the end, perhaps it’s best to let the writer’s words speak for them. A century after she went “street-haunting” in London, you can still find Virginia out there. If I choose, I can put down my pen right now and walk to the Cock Tavern on Fleet Street. As newlyweds in 1912, Leonard and Virginia rented rooms at nearby Clifford’s Inn and took their daily meals at the Cock Tavern. The ideal place, then, for a 70th anniversary toast to Virginia Woolf.”
My essay, “Library Haunting,” is an homage of sorts to Woolf’s “Street Haunting.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Women and Writing
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Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
Thanks to Jill Margo and Andris Taskans for this list of women essayists. You can add names to the list.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Women and Writing
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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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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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Sunday, 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
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