Search Results for: writing

A Conversation With Ariel Levy About Writing a Memoir That Avoids ‘Invoking Emotional Tropes’

Longreads Pick

So let’s talk about your realization, or your narrative persona’s realization, through the course of the book, that the rules do apply. They do apply, although—

Well only one: nature, mortality, age, the body. There is that: nobody gets out alive. Like, that. Part of that is your fertility: your fertility will expire, particularly if you’re female; your body will deteriorate, you will age. That is never going to change, that’s life as a human animal. And I think that that’s one of the things that it means to be a grown-up is to slowly, slowly realize that. Remember when you’re a little kid and you’re like, “Yyyyeeeah, I’m actually not gonna die”?

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,391 words)

A Conversation With Ariel Levy About Writing a Memoir That Avoids ‘Invoking Emotional Tropes’

Photo Credit: David Klagsbrun

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2017 | 17 minutes (4,391 words)

 

When she was 22 and an assistant at New York Magazine, Ariel Levy, hungry for success and action, went to a nightclub for obese women and reported her first story. New York published the resulting piece with what Levy, two decades later, claims is still the best headline she’s had: “WOMEN’S LB.” Levy worked for New York until 2008, when she was hired as a staff writer at The New Yorker. There, she has focused largely on gender and sexuality: she’s profiled comedian Ali Wong, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, boxer Claressa Shields, and Nora Ephron. She has traveled to Jerusalem with Mike Huckabee, to Italy to report on Silvio Berlusconi, to South Africa to report on runner Caster Semenya.

And she has traveled to Mongolia. In 2012—38 years old, married and in love, and five months pregnant—Levy got on a plane for what she felt would be her last big trip for a long time. But, while there, a pain in her abdomen grew and grew until, in the middle of dinner at a Japanese restaurant, she had to rush back to her hotel room before the food came. On the floor of her hotel bathroom, an “unholy storm” moved through her body, and she gave birth to her son. Less than twenty minutes later, he died.

Levy recounted this experience in her first piece of personal writing, the essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” Her new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, tells the broader story of her gradual realization, through trauma and loss—including divorce from her wife, who struggled with alcoholism—that our options are limited by nature.

Having read your work and knowing how adventurous you are, I was surprised to read about how fearful you become before you travel. I’m the type of person who, when I feel very fearful, often heeds that and runs away. You seem to do the opposite—diving headfirst into fear. What’s that about?

That’s just how I’ve always done it. I mean, you’re absolutely right.

If you’re an only child, you only ever talk to grown-ups; it makes you a very weird kid. So when I was a kid learning how to talk to other people my own age, I do think my initial problem was that I’d be really scared, and I’d come on so strong. People were like, “Who is that aggressive, terrifying child?” I was just overcompensating for fear.

That’s definitely how I deal. I hope I’ve gotten less weird socially, but if a story scares me, if a job scares me, I’m definitely going to dive in. I just didn’t like the idea of living a terrified life, you know? I didn’t want to go down that way. Read more…

Dissipation and Disenchantment: The Writing Life in Argentina in the 1990s

Longreads Pick

In 1995, twenty-one year old novelist Mariana Enriquez came to fame in Argentina on the power of a single novel built around youthful subcultures, drugs, and her love of Emily Bronte, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, then she quickly sank back into the shadows. She liked it that way.

Published: Feb 21, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,334 words)

Writing for Rejection (and Reading Doris Lessing)

Longreads Pick

On reality, writing, publishing, fiction, non-fiction, Doris Lessing, and femininity: a writer muses on writing that impacted her, and what it means to write fiction at all.

Author: Nell Zink
Source: n+1
Published: Feb 24, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,525 words)

Writing Our America

Longreads Pick

“This is our America. It’s our America to write in, and our America to write.” Korb’s essay is adapted from a talk he presented at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. It includes advice from writers of “YA fiction, writers for television and stage, of novels and essays, investigative journalism, and criticism” on how we might produce meaningful work in the next four years.

Author: Scott Korb
Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 9, 2017
Length: 32 minutes (8,200 words)

Writing Our America

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Scott Korb | Longreads | February 2017 | 32 minutes (8,200 words)

 

The following essay is adapted from a talk presented at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. It includes advice from writers of “YA fiction, writers for television and stage, of novels and essays, investigative journalism, and criticism” on how we might produce meaningful work in the next four years.

* * *

I often teach a piece of writing by David Foster Wallace, included originally as the introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays. He called the piece “Deciderization—2007,” a title that jabbed at the then-current president, George W. Bush, who, in the midst of his second term—in the midst of the Iraq war, which as fought had been lost—reminded the country during a press conference insisting he would not fire Donald Rumsfeld, whom he would later fire, that he, George W. Bush, was “The Decider.”

The moment seems far away now, but Bush’s choice of words here, it was said at the time, “struck the national funny bone.” Writing in the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg said,

On the Internet, it was memorialized to the tune of “I am the Walrus,” by the Beatles. (“I am me and Rummy’s he. Iraq is free and we are all together.”) On late-night television, the Decider emerged as a comic-book hero, courtesy of Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.”

In other words, in making fun of Bush, Wallace was not alone and, as he was well aware, was far from the most high-profile or widely observed jabber. Opening the book’s introduction, he wrote, “I think it’s unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction.”

Most of the people I know treat Best American anthologies like Whitman Samplers. They skip around, pick and choose. There isn’t the same kind of linear commitment as in a regular book. … There’s a kind of triage. The guest editor’s intro is last, if at all.

This sense of being last or least likely confers its own freedoms.

When I’ve taught his introduction before I’ve tended to highlight how Wallace considers and reconsiders the essay form itself—“one constituent of the truth about the front cover,” he writes, “is that your guest editor isn’t sure what an essay even is.” This confusion is fun in a way that Wallace is often fun. It does what this particular writer tends to do—puts his own subjectivity front and center in an effort to pull a rug out from under us. What do you mean you don’t know what an essay even is?

Continuing on, Wallace then addresses his lack of both confidence and concern with the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction—more fun for us—only to change course a moment later, explaining that he does care about such differences, but conceding that they’re “hard to talk about in a way that someone who doesn’t try to write both fiction and nonfiction will understand.” At which point he dives into the part of the essay I’ve always been most interested in talking about with writing students, who tend—as I am—to be interested in how to do what writers are trying to do. What is writing supposed to feel like?

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

The intergenre debates that go on in our culture have been a great pleasure to me over the years. I like what journalist Jeff Sharlet says on the point: “Fiction’s first move is imagination; nonfiction’s is perception.” And to be sure, I’m always delighted to hear from someone about the abyss under poetry’s tightrope. Read more…

The Messy Divides in Travel Writing

Departures board in airport
Helsinki departures board / Wikimedia Commons

Travel writing is where I cut my teeth as a blogger and how I found my way as a writer. An early adopter of blogging, I benefited directly from the shift to a focus on independent voices. I never quite made the leap to full on commercial blogger, though — my heart lies elsewhere and I figure we’ve all got enough marketing in our lives. That’s just the context behind why the wonky part of my brain loves this piece at Nieman Storyboard about what travel writing is:

It wasn’t until I discovered the notion of writing about “place” during my early years as an undergraduate studying journalism at the University of Missouri that I realized that perhaps travel writing isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to travel, but I also want to tell stories. I want to get to know people – what brought them to their spot on the map, how they shaped that spot and were shaped by it.

What makes a work a piece of “travel writing”? Where do we draw the line between writing about “travel” and writing about “place”? I turned to a few writers who have straddled this line to find an answer.

Ten-plus years in the field makes me think there’s:

  • Marketing: projects underwritten by travel brands who what to promote themselves via content.
  • Vacation writing: Guide books and how-to articles that help travelers plan.
  • Travel narrative: Stories that aren’t just “What I did on my summer vacation” style reporting.
  • Journalism: Reporting and deep dives about place, regional food, history, culture… the definer “travel” is optional here.

The writers interviewed here — Lauren Quinn, Paul Salopek, and the new to me Mark Johanson — don’t need “travel” appended to their work to make it sing of places that are not home. That’s the stuff I like best.

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Cat Marnell’s Rehab Writing Retreat

At New York Magazine’s The Cut, Emily Gould profiles Cat Marnell, the famously self-destructive former beauty editor who miraculously managed to complete a compelling, well-written memoir, How to Murder Your Life — despite first blowing her entire advance on drugs.

Marnell missed her first book deadline, overdosed on heroin, and spent her whole advance before writing a word. She more than justified the concerns of everyone who thought that book would never be written.

But then Marnell managed to get herself to rehab, at a facility in Thailand helmed by a guru who also treats Pete Doherty. There, she finally started writing without her usual helpers. “Rehab is basically a memoir-writing workshop,” she told me. “You have to reiterate your story so many times, you storyboard it out. You basically leave with an outline that you can send to a publisher.” Now, despite a recent “drug vacation” (more on that below), she says that she’s healthier than ever before. “My survival is not a fluke. I have definitely chosen the better path.” The mere fact of the book’s existence means that she is capable of putting her ambition ahead of her addiction, at least temporarily. The book is also far from messy — her control of style and tone is impressive, as is her wry self-awareness.

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The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act

Longreads Pick

An essay by memoirist Melissa Febos in which she responds to her Sarah Lawrence students’ fears around writing about their traumas, and concerns about being accused of “navel gazing.” She rejects the notion that there are already too many stories about trauma and personal experiences out there–along with other notions about memoir as narcissistic, arguments she believes are designed to silence women. “It is not gauche to write about trauma,” she writes. “It is subversive.”

Source: Poets & Writers
Published: Jan 23, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,688 words)

Rewriting the Code of Life

Longreads Pick

Can we eliminate diseases like Lyme and malaria by rewriting DNA? Specter walks us through a powerful new biological tool capable of altering the genetic destiny of a species.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 26, 2016
Length: 28 minutes (7,159 words)