Tom Wolfe was on my list of must-read books in high school, back in the early 1970s (yes, young’uns, before blogging, Internet, faxing, and photocopying. I went to college with a Smith Corona with an automatic return, and that made me hot stuff). I was supposed to like Tom Wolfe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ken Kesey, Joseph […]
Up to now I’ve been immune to the Famous Writer Panic Syndrome, where an MFA student is so rocked by the exquisite perfection of a famous writer that it sends the student into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I know I don’t write as well as Virginia Woolf or Gretel Ehrlich, but I am […]
I’ve spent the weekend working on an essay about how the working poor fight our wars. No military writing can be the same, though, after a writer reads Michael Herr’s accounts of Vietnam in 1967-1968, written in country for Esquire Magazine. (I just re-read that sentence, and I know it’s weak, but it will have […]
I’ve been deep into my own writing; research for the latest piece includes a 1932 Army cooking guide, a history of Civil War military food, and Paul Dickson’s 1978 book, “Chow: A Cook’s Tour of Military Food,” not the best writing but served up with love, detail, and plenty of photographs. However, last week for […]
So I did my presentation on “Perfect Past,” Nabokov’s wonderfully, impossibly flawless autobiographical essay, and it went well, and then we turned to “The Doomed in their Sinking,” a 1972 essay by William Gass (collected in The World Within the Word). This is a technically excellent, masterfully erudite essay that outrages me on two points. […]
(Nice update, small-pieces-loosely-joined-wise: I was tipped off today that the radio piece discussed in this post can be found on the Public Radio Exchange, which is where KQED found it.) For my workshop class, I am supposed to turn in 300 words on Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” this week, and it has been rough […]
I was deep into a beautiful essay by Nabokov (a redundant phrase), wondering why the words felt so familiar, when I glanced at a footnote on the main page and realized the essay I was reading was the precursor to the beginning of Speak, Memory. I last read Speak, Memory in college, which means more […]
This is a light reading (and heavy writing) week for me, but that’s deceptive. For my nonfiction literature class, in the last couple of weeks I’ve had the joy of seeing Wyoming through Gretel Ehrlich’s essays of place in The Solace of Wide Open Spaces, and I’ve re-read John Agee’s essay, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” […]
In my writing program, I’m quickly developing an allergy to the memoir. Not that it isn’t a valid form, but I am starting to think, can anyone write anything but memoir? The Night Gardener, by Marjorie Sandor, proves that the answer to that is a resounding “Yes.” These highly personal essays go above straightforward storytelling […]
Two weeks ago I had to write a short review of the movie Sideways for class. I wrote it neat, with a water back, about what I saw as a central problem with the story. I was a wee too shy to post it on FRL, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint–perhaps my concern that […]