memoir
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The Rumpus Interview with Maya Angelou
In February 2013, just over a year before her death, Maya Angelou spoke to Whitney Mackman about her writing process, her influences, and the act of looking for joy.
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Dissecting Possibilities
When asked about the seeds of his new memoir, Francisco Goldman was more than candid: This book emerged because I wasn’t ready to go back to fiction. I had a form of survivor’s guilt, I suppose. For me, writing imaginary…
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Road Tripping for Inspiration
“We’re doing this because we’re buds and we’re starting new books. We’ve always talked our ideas through with each other; it’s always helped. Through these conversations, we’ve grown as writers together.” Josh Weil and Mike Harvkey have been longtime friends.…
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Memoir vs. Status Updates
In an era when people live tweet every aspect of their lives, the memoir might seem an antiquated notion. Dani Shapiro disagrees. Status updates are immediate, instant acts of narcissism. Writing a memoir requires introspection and distance. Shapiro explains over…
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Letting the Story Surprise You
As part of their series on the craft of non-fiction and the personal essay, Michael Steinberg discusses the struggles and surprises of writing his memoir in the Tri-Quarterly Review. As I kept going, there were times when it felt like…
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Books about Books
In 2011, Phyllis Rose read every book on the LEQ-LES shelf in the New York Public Library and wrote about the experience in an essay collection called The Shelf. In doing so, Rose joined the long tradition of “bibliomemoirs”—a blend…
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The Great Nonfiction Escape
But in the grand scheme of things, immersion journalism and other forms of narrative nonfiction, such as memoir, have done more for me as a reader than as a writer, allowing me to vicariously experience things I’d be too much…
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Getting Personal for Better Narratives
Personal narratives offer writers an important source of inspiration for their writing. Writers edit out the dull portions of their lives to create a version that is both interesting and representative of a kind of universal experience. Kim Triedman writes…
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Hold Nothing Back
Worried you are too young to be working on a memoir? Worried you are revealing too many deep dark secrets and your relatives will disown you forever? Author Gary Shteyngart, 41—which he says is 74 in Russian years—shares some words…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jen Doll
Memoirist and Atlantic Wire blogger Jen Doll talks about weddings, open-bar hijinks, and what does and doesn’t work for her commitment-wise.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Christensen
Six-time novelist Kate Christensen talks about the shift to memoir, the benefits of blogging, using food as a springboard to tell the story of one’s life, and American society’s ongoing problem with pressuring women to be thin.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kevin Brockmeier
Writer Kevin Brockmeier talks about his memoir A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, the painful nature of seventh grade, treading the line between fact and fiction, and why he would save Karen Russell in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.