Interview on Writing. Life.
Monday, May 16th, 2011
The thoughtful and insightful Julija Sukys interviews me today on her blog. Thanks, Julija, for the opportunity to chat with you.
Proved on the Pulses: On the Essay and its Literary Cousins
Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’
“Library Haunting” in Delaware
Thursday, April 14th, 2011
I just got a surprising message from Kathy Graybeal, from the State of Delaware’s Division of Libraries. My essay “Library Haunting” is featured today on their blog! I’m honoured (or should I say honored?) and delighted. Thanks to The New Quarterly, who published it first, and to the Utne Reader, for picking it up. And thanks to Kathy and the other Delaware librarians who saw fit to feature it!
Nathalie Foy’s Books on Books
Saturday, 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.
Why Are We Suspicious of the First Person Voice?
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
A thoughtful post from biographer Julija Šukys on her blog Writing. Life. Thanks to Andrew Westoll for the link.
“It’s easy to sneer at the glut of memoirs of the past decade, and to discredit the genre as somehow dishonest or narcissistic, but autobiographical texts and personal essays that really work are always about something bigger than the person writing them.
The best first-person texts flirt with navel-gazing, but are redeemed by insight, artistry, self-criticism, and honesty. By telling a story about their own singular lives, skilled autobiographers and personal essayists inspire revelations. In other words, these texts not only reveal something about the person writing them, but also about the one reading them.”
What Makes an Essay Personal?
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
See The New Quarterly editor Kim Jernigan’s smart and articulate take on this, here.
“First, what a personal essay is not: it’s not journalism. It can be about anything (religion, politics, natural history, art, music, literature, science, food, travel, play, you name it, and the tone can be equally disparate), but it is not written on assignment. It comes instead from the writer’s own fund of interests and obsessions, questions to be raised or answered, observations, fantasies, regrets, uncertainties, delight. It evolves from a desire to know or to understand, to make connections. It is often triggered by some sort of experience in the world. It will sometimes lead to research, always to reflection. Above all, it is engaged.”
Note that there’s still time to enter TNQ’s Edna Staebler Contest for the personal essay. Details here.
