Brevity Podcast Episode #5 Dinty W. Moore
August 15, 2017 § 7 Comments
It’s time once again for the intermittent Brevity Podcast! Listen right from this post, or click over to iTunes, Soundcloud or Stitcher. If you’re subscribed, we’ll show up in your podcast app queue. And wherever you listen or download us, please take a moment to leave a brief review–it helps us show up in searches and recommendations.
Episode #5 features an interview with Dinty W. Moore, our very own Editor in Chief and founder of Brevity. Dinty will be keynote speaking at the Hippocamp Creative Nonfiction Conference September 8-10 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Show notes and links to people, places and things we’ve discussed are below. Next episode, we’ll be talking with Donna Talarico-Beerman, Editor in Chief at Hippocampus and the Hippocampus Press.
Show Notes: Episode #5 People and Books
We’re guessing you already know who Dinty is if you’re here, but you can find out more about the author of The Story Cure at his website, and follow him on Facebook.
The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, American Style
It’s the wrong time of year for Peeps, but catch them around Easter. If you’re looking for Samuel Pepys, find out more here. You can also read his exhaustive diary, one of the great records of 17th-Century London, including eyewitness reports of the Plague and the Great Fire of London.
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Allison K Williams is the host of the Brevity Podcast. She’ll also be appearing at Hippocamp for an intensive workshop on Self-Editing and consultations on your pages.
An Earlier Life: Brenda Miller
March 14, 2016 § 3 Comments
Ovenbird Books will soon release frequent Brevity contributor Brenda Miller’s new essay collection, An Earlier Life. With this title, Ovenbird Books launches its new incarnation as Judith Kitchen’s Ovenbird Books, in honor of our friend Judith Kitchen, a fine writer and dedicated editor and teacher who died in 2014.
Judith Kitchen’s Ovenbird Books promotes innovative, imaginative, and experimental works of creative nonfiction. B.J. Hollars says of An Earlier Life: “Each essay’s a revelation, an untangling, an epiphany whispered in our ears.”
An Earlier Life contains two Brevity essays: “In Orbit” and “Gizzards.” Brenda has made a book trailer that gives us a taste of what to expect in this latest collection of lyric essays:
Steinberg’s Tribute to Judith Kitchen, CNF Pioneer
January 27, 2015 § 3 Comments
Michael Steinberg, founding editor of the journal Fourth Genre and co-editor of the textbook/anthology of the same name, pays tribute to CNF pioneer Judith Kitchen on his blog this week. Steinberg acknowledges Kitchen for being “one of the first people who wrote, taught, and could speak with authority on/about what we’ve come to describe as ‘creative nonfiction’.” She certainly was, and Judith was among the most generous of literary figures as well.
She is greatly missed. Michael’s blog tribute, with excerpts from Kitchen’s essay “Mending Wall,” is well worth a read, including this gem of a paragraph, quoting Judith on the overuse of the term lyric essay:
This past year, I attended a reading of “lyric essays,” and nothing I heard was, to my mind, lyric. My ears did not quicken. My heart did not skip. What I heard was philosophical meditation, truncated memoir, slipshod research, and just-plain-discursive opinion. A wall of words. But not a lyric essay among them. The term had been minted (brilliantly, it seems to me) by Deborah Tall, then almost immediately undermined. Not all essays are lyric. Repeat. Not all essays are lyric. Not even all short essays are lyric. Some are merely short. Or plainly truncated. Or purely meditative. Or simply speculative. Or. Or. Or. But not lyric. Because, to be lyric, there must be a lyre.
AWP 2013: That Genre Thing Again
March 11, 2013 § 19 Comments
A guest blog from Kathleen Stone:
Fiction/nonfiction: what’s the difference? If there’s a difference, does it matter? And either way, what responsibility does the author have to readers and subjects?
By the third day of AWP, I thought I couldn’t bear to hear these questions discussed. I thought Lawrence Weschler’s observation about narrative voice and the division of the world between those who know it’s a fiction and those who don’t had been chewed over enough to last me a lifetime. But still, something drew me to the Why Genre Matters panel. Maybe the names of the panelists, or something about the blurb in the conference book drew me in, but whatever it was, I grabbed another cup of coffee and soldiered on.
Nonfictionist and moderator Dinah Lenney led off with her own strong point of view. An author and reader are like two people on a see-saw, with movement and balance between them. When the author doesn’t clue us in, and we don’t know what we hold in our hands, then the see-saw is left with only one person — out of balance and disappointing. There is a diff, and it matters.
Scott Nadelson countered with the oft-made observation that there is no such thing as objectivity. A blurring between genres necessarily follows, and the author can rely on voice and form to tip off the reader to what’s on the page. His recent book, The Next Scott Nadelson, A Life in Progress, may be labeled a memoir, but it comes without a guaranty of accuracy. So maybe there’s no diff at all?
Essayist and critic Sven Birkerts analogized genre to etiquette. Genre distinctions are like rules, necessary for maintaining harmony amid the tensions, but they need not be stultifying, even as please and thank you are not. A psyche that invents and writes about a blue bucket is not very different from a psyche that remembers a blue bucket, but different motivations are at play – – this could have been vs. this happened. Writers of both genres share the act of creation, of giving narrative shape to the work, but for nonfiction writers, the engine is memory.
Poet David Beispiel joined Scott in label bashing. Writers should be free to write whatever they want and label it however they want (or perhaps not at all). Labels exist for the bookseller who wants to know what to order and how to display it, not for the author or reader. I wonder what he thinks about truth in politics – after all, he does write for Politico.
Multi-genre writer Judith Kitchen agreed Weschler was right about narrative voice being a fiction. It’s simply a lens for delivery, involving an aesthetic decision but not a deliberate fabrication. A flood she experienced as a child, which she has repeatedly and variously treated it in her own work, is an actual event seen through different lenses, sometimes intensely and sometimes in passing, but always drawn from memory. Judith concluded with a segue to why we like memoir: it takes the place of gossiping with a neighbor over the clothesline. That clothesline is gone for most of us and we embrace memoir to fill the void.
So, I’m glad I grabbed another cup of coffee and pushed aside my conference fatigue on Saturday morning to hear Why Genre Matters. Or maybe it doesn’t. The panel offered one of the most heady and honest exchanges of AWP.
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Kathleen Stone is a writer who lives in Boston. Her work has been published in Points East, a sailing magazine, and she has dreams of many more publications to follow.
AWP Flash Nonfiction Panel and Booksigning
March 4, 2013 § 1 Comment
Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore and Brevity contributors Sue William Silverman, Peggy Shumaker, Judith Kitchen, and Ira Sukrungruang will be at the Boston AWP Conference this week to discuss the flash nonfiction form in the panel “Write Short, Think Long: Exploring the Craft of Writing Flash Nonfiction.”
Please join us if you are in town:
Friday, March 8
3:00 pm: The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction contributors Sue William Silverman, Peggy Shumaker, Judith Kitchen, and Ira Sukrungruang discuss the flash nonfiction form in the panel “Write Short, Think Long: Exploring the Craft of Writing Flash Nonfiction.” Room 108, Plaza Level
And immediately following, there will be a signing at the Rose Metal Press Table at the Book Fair:
Friday, March 8
4:30 pm: RMP Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction editor Dinty W. Moore and a number of contributors, including Sue William Silverman, Peggy Shumaker, Judith Kitchen, and Ira Sukrungruang will be signing copies of the Field Guide at the Rose Metal Press bookfair table, B5
An Essay Renaissance? We Hope So
June 13, 2012 § 2 Comments
David L. Ulin at the Los Angeles Times suggests we may be experiencing an essay renaissance with this quick review of five new books (two by Brevity authors, Lia Purpura and Judith Kitchen.) Here are his nice words on Lia and Judith, followed by a link to the entire (brief) review:
Lia Purpura’s “Rough Likeness” (Sarabande: 150 pp., $15.95 paper) is all about looking: at a landscape, at language, at a sign. The truest-looking, though, comes on the inside, as Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about what she sees but what it means. “Rain coming harder,” she writes in her opening to “Against ‘Gunmetal.'” “Of interest … because rain alters people in unexpected ways. And the unexpected makes people so human. … Remember that.”
In “Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate” (Coffee House: 204 pp., $16 paper), Judith Kitchen uses family photos as a hinge for her own interior investigation — into love, doubt, family and time. Weaving actual images directly into the book, she addresses what she doesn’t know, what she can’t know, as evocatively as what she can. “This is not art,” she writes in “On Snapshots: A Sonnet.” “This is the black and white of birthdays and summer vacations. Grandma’s Sunday best.”
Judith Kitchen: Family, Photography, and Fate
April 16, 2012 § 3 Comments
On his blog, Joe Bonomo interviews Judith Kitchen about her new book Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate, and about what can be found in our old family photographs. Great insight from a brilliant mind:
I see the family tree stretching backward and sense the patterns of immigration, the various individual hardships that add up to my own fairly easy American life. I see larger patterns of history, and the way my family did—and didn’t—participate in some of the shaping events of the last century. I see a tendency toward perverse individualism that, I now suspect, can be encouraged in a family like ours. And of course some photographs opened questions, hinted at, not secrets so much, but other lives that had their own fascinating trajectories. Most of all, I found lots of photographs that revealed humor—the sheer good spirits in which they were snapped. That honestly surprised me.
The 2011 JUDITH KITCHEN PRIZE in CREATIVE NONFICTION
November 8, 2010 § Leave a comment
Water~Stone Review has announced the Judith Kitchen Prize in Nonfiction, in honor of Judith Kitchen, distinguished author and editor.
Here are the details:
$1,000 PRIZE & PUBLICATION.
FINAL JUDGE: essayist Poe Ballantine, author of 501 Minutes to Christ.
Original, unpublished work from emerging and/or established writers—the editorial board and final judge will not see names.
Submissions will be accepted October 1, 2010 through December 1, 2010, and require a $15 entry fee.