Lisa Harper's memoir A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood is more than just her story of becoming a mother. It tells all from conception to her daughter's first word. Kirkus called it "A sweet, immediate articulation of the experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood." A Double Life was featured on Largehearted Boy's book note series, in which authors create playlists to accompany their books. Check out Harper’s playlist — as well as her reasons for selecting the songs she did — here. Harper also was on Glimmer Train, writing about finding a balance between parenting and writing. She discusses how … Continue reading A Double Life trailer and then some

Tracy Seeley, author of the forthcoming My Ruby Slippers, wrote a guest post on the Writer’s Digest blog. In the post, she discusses three privacy issues that come up when a writer decides to tell her personal story. To read all of her advice, check out the blog. My Ruby Slippers is Seeley’s memoir of her personal search for home. In her childhood, her father’s dreams kept them moving constantly. By the time she was nine, she had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. My Ruby Slippers describes Seeley's search for the true meaning of home.  Lewis Buzbee, … Continue reading Advice on writing memoirs

Alan Zaremba, author of The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas, is in Las Vegas as I write this. He’s keeping his own blog through the weekend, and I’ll be pulling stuff from his blog and posting it here, because he writes a mean running commentary on the chaos that is March Madness in Las Vegas. Here’s a post from last night: I am back in Las Vegas for March Madness, having arrived last night, March 17th, to the quiet rustic country sounds of Las Vegas. Not. I imagine that St. Patrick's Day is … Continue reading The first of several excerpted March Madness blogs, and a sneak preview of what’s to come

Lopate and Loren: Two Reasons to Fall in Love with the Essay All Over Again
By Kate Flaherty

Let me begin by telling you I love essays. I was one of the two kids in my high school English class who was sorry when the Emerson and Thoreau unit ended. My favorite scene in the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder did not have to do with her move to the great plains in a wagon or riding a wild mustang or meeting her true love Almonzo, but instead with when she was able to go to high school and write her first composition (her topic was “ambition”).

And when I first began working at Prairie Schooner, I loved everything in the magazine—poetry, interviews, stories (what can I say, I’m a bookworm)—but the essays were my favorite sons and daughters. Sydney Lea, Paul Mariani, Nancy Willard, Linda Pastan, JoAnn Beard, Maxine Kumin—these writers were the scientists of literature, examining nature or people or truth with a microscopic eye and sharing their discoveries with their readers. It didn’t matter to me if the essays were about tramping around in the Vermont woods, following the descent into madness of a brilliant poet, attending a wedding in an Iowa cornfield, or dissecting the meaning behind the random murder of a family member in Detroit. I loved the attention to detail, the connections writers made between one world and others, the thoughtfulness of their meditations, and the fact (and yes, fact is an important word in the world of the essay) that it all was real.

So it should be no surprise I was thrilled Bison Books has republished the collection of essays Against Joie de Vivre by Phillip Lopate, one of the modern masters of the essay form, and republished a collection of essays about poet and literary nonfiction writer Loren Eiseley, Loren Eiseley: Commentary, Biography, and Remembrance, a collection that originally was a special issue of Prairie Schooner edited by Hilda Raz. These are two distinctly different essay collections—the Lopate book is a collection of essays by Lopate, and the Eiseley book is a collection of essays by other writers about Eiseley—and yet they appeal to me for the same reasons. The work in these two books makes me want to revisit writers or worlds I have loved, seek out new writing or new worlds I have yet to discover, and meditate on my own writing and the world I live in right now. 

Continue reading “Guest blogger: Kate Flaherty”