The Shadow in the Garden
I finished reading James Atlas’ curious, somewhat rambling, book The Shadow in the Garden, which is, really, an autobiography of a biographer. Atlas is known for two biographies–Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), and Bellow: A Biography (2000), as well as being the editor of the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. His two main […]
The Evolution of the Book
Julie Dreyfus is a copywriter and editor at Christie’s auction house in New York. Early in her career, she was an intern at Christie’s working in the books and manuscripts department. With her animation collaborators, she sets out to answer three questions in this short video for TED-Ed, the educational arm of the famous media […]
Graydon Carter’s Formula for Magazine Articles
“I believe that the best magazine articles have at least two–and better three–elements to them: access, narrative, and disclosure. That is,: on-the-ground reporting; a story arc with a beginning, middle, and end; and revelations that move the scholarship forward. A great magazine article must also always have at its core a measure of conflict.” — […]
Pencil Perfect
What is a pencil? Henry Petroski, the engineer and author of the wonderful 1990 book, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, describes it as “the ephemeral medium of thinkers, planners, drafters; the medium to be erased, revised, smudged, obliterated, lost or inked over.” Yes, all true, and there is something romantic about them, certainly viewed […]
Promethea Unbound in The Atavist
The basic story: A child genius (IQ 173), named Jasmine, starts reading at one, enrolls in Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth at five, learns college-level calculus at seven, is featured on the CBS documentary series 48 Hours in an episode called “Whiz Kids,” and completes a BA in Mathematics at Montana State University at […]
A Moonless, Starless Sky
Alexis Okeowo’s recent book, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, grew out of reporting she was doing on the kidnapping of more than 300 girls in northeastern Nigeria by terrorist group, Boko Haram. She had found a vigilante who abandoned the organization and a schoolgirl who had escaped, and was […]
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 […]