As Director of CAS I want to tell you why I, who have nurtured so many other memoirs to publication, finally felt free to write my own memoir about my mentor, Anaïs Nin, and why it took me so long to address the subject and begin the book. What follows is the preface that I […]
Anaïs Nin introduced me to John Ferrone, her Harcourt Brace Jovanovich editor, at her Silverlake, California house where she lived as the wife of Rupert Pole. John, a New Yorker, knew her other husband, Hugo Guiler, as well, and was privy to the secret of Anaïs’ double life. As one of the most grace-full men […]
GUEST BLOG: Our Transformation from a Journalling Circle to Creating a Book (Wendy and Ahava Writes) Wendy Writes We had been meeting for about two years. It just began to be clear to us, at that point, that we were not just journalling together but were embarking upon a larger project. I suppose we each […]
For the past decade, subsequent to publishing Your Life as Story, I have been interested in developing a form of instant memoir, a new form of diary writing that incorporates the narrative structure of memoir with the immediacy of journal writing. A cross between diary and memoir that offers the benefits of both. In […]
Having recently been interviewed on how to structure travel memoir so it might interest someone besides one’s Facebook or Instagram fans, I dug out an essay I wrote back in the day when CAS stamped and snail-mailed a “First Person” quarterly to donors. Here for this digital medium’s brevity demands, is a new, short version: […]
Guest blog from Evelyn De Wolfe It’s never too late for love and passion, even in one’s eighties. Nor is it too late to share it in a memoir, when that experience turns out to be the most romantic in our lives. Yet, having never tackled this mode of self-expression before, I was daunted by the […]
By Emma J. Stephens Author of For A Dancer: The Memoir I once attended a movie premiere with my friend, its director. The success of his independent film hinged on good reviews, so I was surprised to learn that he had no intention of viewing them. His reasoning was, “People will tell me the […]
In her Aug. 13 blog “The Ethics of Being a Nonfiction Writer” http://dianaraab.com/blog/ author Diana Raab explores the confusing, shifting and disappearing boundaries between fact and fiction in the scandals of Jonah Lehrer and James Frey. This blog is in dialog with hers. I, too, am troubled by the discrediting of James Frey and more recently Jonah Lehrer, […]
Until a few years ago, reading memoir was about as appealing as sitting next to that uncle at a family reunion who wants to tell you all about his latest trip to the podiatrist. “And there was an accident on the highway, and then they didn’t have me in the computer, and then…” (You get […]