WRITE YOUR BOOK! U of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction
Are you a mid-career writer, a veteran journalist, an aspiring author with a book you want to write? The University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction is the place to do it. People in our program come with ideas for issue-driven journalistic projects, memoirs, biographies, or collections of essays. We work with our students — […]
ADVANCED FEATURE WRITING – WINTER 2018
When I began my career as a feature writer, I soon learned that one of the biggest challenges is structuring a longform piece. It has many parts and if any of them are out-of-place the whole thing becomes unsound. (To readers, that means confused enough to make them stop reading.) That’s why I spend two […]
The Writing Life
These are, alas, accurate observations about writing.
Truman Capote’s Unanswered Prayers
Truman Capote was gifted in so many ways, but his fatal weakness was chasing hedonism & notoriety. After the huge success of In Cold Blood, he told a friend that his follow-up, a roman à clef called Answered Prayers, was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He told People magazine that he […]
BOOKS THAT MATTER: “Barbarian Days”
For years I’ve been a fan of William Finnegan’s writing in The New Yorker. He’s been a staff writer since 1987, contributing remarkable pieces on geo-political conflicts and social dislocation in Europe, the Balkans, Africa, South & Central America, and the U.S. A multi-award winner, I’ve re-read several times “The Countertraffickers,” his story on Stella Otaru, […]
Memoir as Psychological Thriller
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read the book & don’t want the resolution revealed, avoid the final two paras. I met noted broadcaster and journalist Pauline Dakin when she enrolled in the University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She had two book ideas. One addressed the kind of medical and health issues […]
“We’ve Got Your Book”
I’m in Halifax for the annual two-week summer residency, the centerpiece of the University of King’s College’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, where I’m on faculty as one of eight mentor-advisors. The only low-residency creative nonfiction MFA offered in Canada, it’s a two-year program that, in addition to the summer sessions, includes a week-long […]
BOOKS THAT MATTER: “The Soul of a New Machine”
Wired Magazine called it “the original nerd epic.” It displayed author Tracy Kidder’s gift for explaining technology to a general reader without being dismissed as simplistic (or, worse, wrong) by gearheads. It launched Tracy Kidder’s career and won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Although The Soul of a New Machine chronicled cutting edge […]
Voice and Memoir
In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she writes about “voice” being the key element in all writing. But, she continues, “each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice. It’s the delivery system for the author’s experience — the big bandwidth cable that carries in lustrous clarity every pixel of someone’s inner and outer […]
Where Ideas Come From
People who aren’t journalists, and journalism students, often ask, “where do feature ideas come from?” It’s one of the toughest parts of the business not because ideas aren’t out there by the thousands, but because recognizing them is a mix of technique, instinct, and experience. Sometimes they emerge from reading. Susan Orlean explained the genesis […]