Yesterday I read an entertaining story by Curtis Sittenfeld in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue about students in a writing program in the mid-West. Having never studied writing, I’m intrigued by stories of MFA programs. At prestigious ones like the Iowa Writers Workshop (which may have been the disguised setting of this story) gifted people are taught by some of the best practitioners in their genres, not unlike, say, at MIT. In a highly competitive atmosphere, they learn and grow and graduate extremely well-trained. But I can’t help but feel that something is missing due to their years spent in school with people very much like themselves instead of out in the world, with all its variety. Of course I would, wouldn’t I? But much more than science, writing is dependent on human experience.
Writing a memoir I sometimes worry about living in the past, so I was thrilled to learn about the men working to bring back the woolly mammoth.
It always puzzled me that people in their 30s were writing memoirs. Then I realized it’s the perfect time to do so in a country that has no interest in the past.
An aphoristic stretch here means either I don't have much to write about or I have a lot to write about someplace else.
The fashion in memoirs is for 'brutally honest.' I'm aiming for 'elegantly authentic.'
My unpublished letter to the New York Times Book Review:
In his review of Paul Theroux’s new novel “Mother Land” (May 14), Stephen King announced that, before the assignment, he had always meant to but had never gotten around to reading Theroux. Never read his classic The Great Railway Bazaar – which made the travel book in the ’80s what the memoir is today – his fresh-eyed account of traveling around the Mediterranean, his opus on the South Pacific, his books about Africa, his most recent and indignant travel book about rural poverty in the Deep South. That the most famous novelist in America had never read the greatest travel writer in America illustrates the margins in which travel writing unjustly lives. It also helps explain why Americans know so little about the world.