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 […]

The Outsider: Alex Kotlowitz

I’m a huge fan of the Longform podcast, those hour-long interviews with many of the best nonfiction writers in America. Recently I listened to one with the award-winning journalist Alex Kotlowitz, who many will know from his features in The New Yorker (“The Trenchcoat Robbers” is a classic), The Atlantic or The New York Times […]

Living With Rejection

Every writer faces rejection. It’s brutal and it’s not confined to early in a career. It never fails to wound and it welcomes self-persecution. It has the capacity to undermine confidence like nothing else. James Salter called it a daily “feeling of injustice.” An inability to deal with it may end more careers than any […]

The Line Between Fact and Fiction

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow but raised in Sierra Leone. She lived through the rancorous break-up of her parents and the persecution, and finally execution, of her father, a doctor and opposition leader during the period of violent civil war in that country. She returned to Scotland to live with her mother and, after getting a […]

You Say Pilcrow, I say Para…

A friend, Marco Ursi, asked on Facebook about teaching his fifth graders about paragraphs. That made me think of the paragraph symbol, which I knew had a name but couldn’t remember what it was. So I consulted my copy of software engineer and writer Keith Houston’s book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & […]