Revving Up Reading

Mercy papers      Robin   Ted Kooser   Abigail  Cooper

 

I'm revving up to teach “Memoir and Personal Essay: the Next Level” at the Writers Studio for UCLA Extension this week. Though revving up sounds much more active than what I'm actually doing – which is reading. Reading all day! Finding the most amazing and wonderful books – revisiting old familiar writers and discovering new ones. I'm sitting here in my office feeling like I'm in the middle of a party. Mark Doty is here, Nick Flynn, Vivian Gornick, Bernard Cooper, Kate Braestrup, my beloved Ted Kooser, Abigail Thomas, even the President! (Have you read Dreams From My Father yet?) I just started a new memoir that got reviewed on the front page of the NYT Book Review  a few weeks ago – The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm.  She writes about the last three weeks of her mother’s life, and somehow  it’s harrowing, funny, sad, sweet and filled with anger all at the same time.

 

For those of you who are writing memoir, or want to, have you read Abigail Thomas's Thinking About Memoir? It's a tiny book packed with good advice, sane ideas, quirky writing and a lot of writing exercises. "Writing memoir," she writes,  "is a way to figure out who you used to be and how you got to be who you are."

 

I’ll be teaching eight hours a day for the next four days so this blog will be silent. I’ll post some of the writing exercises from the workshop next week.

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