Last week, I gave a seminar on “making the ask,” the art of the interview. My first question to the students in Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing program was, “Are you shy?” I asked them to raise their hands if they are. Some were too shy to do so. The art of the interview,… Continue Reading
Natasha Trethewey’s Call
This is how it’s done. In the early 1990s, you go off to graduate school in Massachusetts, though you are from the south. You study poetry there, because this will help you make sense of your mother’s murder by her second husband, and other matters including being the daughter of an interracial couple. You come… Continue Reading
Woody Allen’s Steal Trap
What is the statute of limitations on a writer stealing from himself? I considered this point as I watched with a reasonable measure of delight Woody Allen’s latest, To Rome With Love, which packed the local cinema in the fashion of his early works. In a broad sense, of course, Allen repeats himself often —… Continue Reading
Bobbie Ann Mason, Time Traveler
I wrote the novelist Bobbie Ann Mason to ask her thoughts on one of the trickiest tasks of the writer — going back and forth in time. I have been a fan of the author since 1985, when I read In Country, Mason’s novel of the aftermath of the Vietnam War — a subject that… Continue Reading
Nora’s Neck, Meryl’s Eyes
I focus today not on Nora Ephron’s abundant humor — a mighty legacy in itself — but her gift of poignancy. I wish I’d had a chance to ask her about her script of Julie and Julia and its most powerful scene. It is when Meryl Streep, playing Julia Child, and on a stroll in… Continue Reading
Book Songs
Well before Billy Collins’s hilarious send-up of nostalgia (Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult) came the work of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross in their musical Damn Yankees. Adler died Thursday at the age of 90, having long survived his collaborator. Ross died in 1955 at only 29, having helped… Continue Reading
Beginnings (A Sequel)
Last week’s commentary on good beginnings was just the beginning of our discussion on why writers often lose readers right at the start. Those writers are guilty, in William Zinsser’s view, of committing an act of literature. In teaching nonfiction and memoir, I hammer away at the matter of stake– as in, what’s at stake,… Continue Reading
Paterno’s Biographer: In A Writer’s Trap
I have been writing a book proposal and thinking of Joe Paterno, and all that. This is not because my proposal has anything to do with the late Penn State icon, or with the scandal that plagues the school, or the grotesque Jerry Sandusky trial. (Unless there is a connection in the cosmic sense —… Continue Reading
Taking the Lede
A reader of yesterday’s post on the importance of openings questioned the use of the word lede, what newspapers used to call the first sentence of pieces. He wrote, “Are you nuts? (How’s that for a first sentence?)…Not lead?” I wrote him back, pointing out that, indeed, lede was the term employed back in the… Continue Reading
For Openers: The Promise of a First Sentence
Have you read, or written, any good first sentences lately? I found three of them in the New York Times last Sunday, maybe something of a record for one edition. From Donna Rifkind’s review of A Difficult Woman, a new biography of Lillian Hellman, by Alice Kessler-Harris: During the great performance that was her life, Lillian Hellman… Continue Reading