Taking the Risk to Write Deeply About Your Family History
Poet and memoirist Benjamin Vogt discusses his own personal journey to learn his family’s history.
Tag Archives: personal essay
When Structure Sets You Free
Essayist and professor Nell Boeschenstein discusses how establishing structure can liberate your writing.
Using the Fallacy of Memory to Create Effective Memoir
Understand the 7 sins of memory, and how to use these sins to convey greater meaning and truth in your stories.
The Yearning to Learn From Our Lives
The personal essay can provide an artful account of earned insight often more useful than years of therapeutic work.
How True and Factual Does Your Memoir Have to Be? 5 Principles
Can we trust our memories as “facts?” And what if others disagree? How do we explain our creative process and answer their protests?
Why Is There a Surge in Memoir? Is It a Good Thing?
Today’s guest post is by Shirley Hershey Showalter, who has been blogging about memoir for four years and is writing a memoir about growing up on a Mennonite farm in the 1950s–60s. Depending on whom you ask—or what lens you apply—memoir is either a boomlet that burst or a timeless form just now coming into its own. The […]