Personal Essays

Al Kinspel 1913-2008

Al Kinspel died yesterday at the age of ninety-four. Years ago he had been a cab driver in San Francisco and then retired and moved to Long Beach to sail his boat. He had no children and his wife died sixteen years ago. He played the piano and the stock market, was a passionate liberal…

An Essay About Denial

I have an essay published in this morning’s Los Angeles Times – one of the few essays I’ve ever written from start to finish in one sitting.  I’m hoping it’s an essay that might change the way at least one or two people think when faced with a similar crisis. As my friend Patricia emailed…

writing the defining detail (…or not)

Look again at last week’s exercise on writing about place. Choose one part of the place you wrote about and see how many layers deep you can go with it. You could use the above example: the street, the house, the door, door knob and buzzer, bell or knocker. Front stoop, keys, mail box or slot, etc. Write three hundred words of description about your own street and front door. Or maybe it’s one city block, a garden or coffee shop. This isn’t about the three hundred words, it’s about using all your senses in order to write them. It’s about working to find the defining detail.

writing about place

A few weeks ago in the Escape section of the New York Times there was a wonderful essay by the actor William H. Macy about his cabin in Northern Vermont. He’d bought in the 80’s; tiny and lacking inside plumbing or electricity, it took him ten years to get to the plumbing. “But the days I spent working on that cabin gave me some of the purest pleasure I have ever known,” he writes. And he still loves it. “A little cabin in Vermont that fits me perfectly.” He writes about the moose who walked toward the cabin with him one night, six raccoons hanging on his bird feeder, going cross country skiing at midnight under a full moon, temperatures dropping to thirty below. Through what he loves and observes in the essay, you get a sense of him as well as the place. (Click the title to read the rest of the post…)

3 steps and 6 questions

Steps for writing and publishing the personal essay:
Brainstorm. Use the issues you generated in the last exercise. Let this be the sloppy part. You’re creating and there’s no way to be neat and right about it. Brooke recently took a wonderful photograph of her nephew Axel painting a blue picture. There’s blue everywhere: on his arms, in his hair. That’s what you’re doing here; getting blue paint all over yourself and writing so fast that your critic can’t offer an opinion. You’re discovering your own material.