Finally, I had the temerity to ask what weaknesses he had as a poet. He responded that his mentor Bernard MacLaverty had told him an anecdote about W. Somerset Maugham. When asked the same question at an interview in Paris the English writer had stated: “My books don’t have lyrical quality.” Whenever any critic reviewed any book by Maugham subsequently, after bouts of praise they would always end with “of course, his writing has no lyrical quality.” We spoke no more of weaknesses.
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There was no murder, but there was illicit sex, suicide, a trial. It was a big story and so difficult to research that I gave up working on it several times. Too much of the source material derived from smudged editions of newspapers on microfilm. Too much of it was couched in nineteenth-century legalese. But even as I contorted my back over the microfilm reader and strained my eyes trying to decipher poorly reproduced pages of ancient newsprint, the story would not let go of me.
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This Really Happened, the popular nonfiction storytelling series, is coming back to Calgary's WordFest on October 16th! With Todd Babiak, Craig Davidson, Ophira Eisenberg, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about story, about the patterns that stories take. When I begin to write a book, I rarely know where it’s going. But go it does, on and on, through a trajectory that is both consciously and unconsciously created. It mainly follows the Western story arc–conflict, rising action, climax, denouement. Even though that seems formulaic, when I write that arc stretches above me, like a preordained path that I, willy-nilly, must follow.
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Chicago doesn't disappoint me. I never have the feeling, as I do when I visit New York, that I have missed out on some tantalizing place that has vanished only recently. Chicago's heydays seem so distant, it's as though there is nothing to lament.
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Yes, it's true! carte blanche and the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society have teamed up to bring you a Canada-wide creative nonfiction contest. The winner will receive $500 and her/his text will be published in carte blanche. The winner will be announced in 2014.
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When I was a teenager, I was in a cult. It started at the Mall. There was a novelty store called Natural Wonders where my best friends and I spent all of our time. We latched onto a kindred spirit, Josh, a twenty-something employee who humored us to the point of jeopardizing his minimum-wage job on several occasions.
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It's almost not thereBerlin builds, forgets itself.Ost: A bitter pils
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Secrets make great stories. I think I understood this even as a child, when during dinner parties, I liked to sit under the dining room table. If I sat long enough, the guests forgot I was there… and then I’d hear the best stories, ones not meant for a little girl’s consumption.
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Sitting in front of a laptop with a digital drawing pad at his side, Gruber asks for a volunteer from the audience to do an improvised animation of their psychic spirit. A contemporary dancer from the front row steps up, and Gruber asks him to choose a background and foreground color from the computer’s colour wheel. He begins to doodle, narrating as he goes along.
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I know the psychoanalysts among us may find this a bit disconcerting, but I’ve been thinking a lot about poor, old Oedipus these days. It’s not Freudian, at least, for my parents’ sake, I hope it’s not; but there is a deeply seated mix of admiration and jealousy at work here. You see, when I think about Oedipus, I think about Sophocles, and when I think about Sophocles, I picture a figure I think I can understand: a writer with a deadline, trying to pull something together in time to make the cut for the annual drama competition in Athens in 429 BC.
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I asked new media artist (and friend) Frances Adair Mckenzie if I could join her in her studio. Pedaling through the plateau, the bustling streets gave way to empty ones lined with boxy concrete condos and towering buildings full of studio space.
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