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Writing Lives

by Erika Dreifus on
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For those of you whose writing interests connect with biography and/or oral history, I’ve found a few announcements that may be useful.

1) The UCLA Alumni Association is looking for three oral historians/senior writers. Job involves conducting interviews with faculty, staff, alumni, and others for use in an upcoming UCLA history book. Very research-intensive. Also involves taping/transcribing interview sessions and compiling post-interview summary reports.

2) The Oral History Association has announced a grant of up to $3,000 “to undertake oral history research in situations of crisis research in the United States and internationally. These funds may be applied to travel, per diem, or transcription costs for research in places and situations in which a longer application time schedule may be problematic. Such crisis situations include but are not limited to wars, natural disasters, political and/or economic/ethnic repression, or other currently emerging events of crisis proportions.” There’s no fee to apply. Applications must be submitted by June 1, 2006. More information is available here.

3) Freelancers near Beverly Hills, California, may want to check out this job opportunity ($15-$40/hour) with NewsBios.com. Job involves “reporting and writing profiles of influential journalists for online biographical service.”

4) And finally, if you just want to sit back and listen to some experts on the subject of “writing lives” (and you’ll be in Cambridge, Massachusetts next Friday), consider attending Writing 20th Century Lives: Biography as History, a conference scheduled for 2PM at Harvard’s Humanities Center on April 28. Panelists include historians Linda Gordon (New York University), Alice Kessler Harris (Columbia University), and Lizabeth Cohen (Harvard University), with Nancy Cott (Harvard University) moderating.

Weekend Reading

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

The new (May-June) Poets & Writers is available, and, as usual, some of its excellent content is online.

1) The current Contester column, by Thomas Hopkins, details the sad story of “The Collapse of Neil Azevedo’s Zoo [Press].” (See my previous post on the subject, too.)

2) Literary agent Scott Hoffman answers Kevin Larimer’s questions in “Q&A: Scott Hoffman’s Reasons to Rep” (see what semi-encouraging news Hoffman has for first-time novelists).

3) I told you that the James Frey saga was still with us. It comes up in the Hoffman Q&A, and there’s an entire piece on “The Literature of Lies”, by Joe Woodward, in this issue too.

Geraldine Brooks on Facts and Fiction

by Erika Dreifus on
1

How often do you get to hear a Pulitzer prizewinner talk about her work-in-progress two days after she has won the prize for her last book? That’s what happened yesterday, when Geraldine Brooks spoke to a (very crowded) audience at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study here in Cambridge. Brooks is an Institute Fellow this year, and her (pre-scheduled) talk focused on “Making Fiction From Fact.”

I thought I’d share some of my notes from the talk:

1) In discussing the “factual” background to her work-in-progress, currently titled The People of the Book, Brooks cited William Styron, who noted that “While it may be satisfying and advantageous for historians to feast on rich archival material, the writer of historical fiction is better off when past events have left him with short rations.” That’s the case for Brooks’s current project, which isn’t as richly “documented” to date as, say, March (the book that just won the Pulitzer) was. For that book, one of Brooks’s research resources was the 61-volume set of journals left by Louisa May Alcott’s father.

2) Reprising some themes I remembered from her New York Times Writers on Writing piece, “Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveler,” Brooks stressed the primacy of empathy in the historical fiction writer’s toolbox. Emotions, she suggested, remain constant from generation to generation.

3) Detailing her own process, Brooks told us that the first thing she needs to do is find a voice for her character. The voice then reveals who the character is. This tells Brooks how the character acts. And what the character does leads Brooks to her research needs. She said that Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier had told her that halfway through writing his novel he made himself a rule: he would not go to the library until he needed to know at least 3 things. Apparently he was becoming too immersed in research. Let the story drive the research, Brooks advises.

4) In a delightfully digressive moment, Brooks (a former journalist) shared her views about the still-present James Frey story. She, for one, seems to wish the book would be off all the nonfiction lists. Calling his book nonfiction, she says, sets the bar too high for people who are trying to do the real thing: write nonfiction. Real nonfiction has to cope with the messiness of life in ways that fiction does not. If his book is considered nonfiction, she suggests, everyone will expect nonfiction writers to “accomplish’ things that are really in the realm of fiction. And those nonfiction writers who can write exemplary seamless stories are devalued when Frey is held up as their peer.

After the talk, the Institute held a reception to honor Brooks. With champagne. (That’s where I snapped the photo.)

Arranging a Poetry Collection

by Erika Dreifus on
1

If you’re a poet, short story writer, or essayist, you’ve probably spent some time (and maybe a lot of time) thinking about ways to structure a collection. In the April Writer’s Digest, Paola Corso offers some tips on how poets can go about this. And the article is available online, too.

Novelist at Work: Allegra Goodman

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Maybe you’ve already seen the excellent article for fiction writers tucked into the “Science Times” section of yesterday’s New York Times. If not, you’ll have to register to read Gina Kolata’s “Writer Depicts Scientists Risking Glory for Truth and Truth for Glory” online. Meantime, here’s a summary:

Allegra Goodman’s new novel, Intuition (Dial Press), is, in Kolata’s words, “a tale about life in a science lab that rings so true and includes details so accurate and vivid that [scientists] say they are left reeling.”

Goodman is not a scientist. So some have wondered how “an outsider, someone who has not been bathed in the culture and mores of science,” “could get it so right?”

Well, apparently her research process has something to do with it. And that’s what the article details.

To return to one of my favorite arguments–writing what you know does not necessarily mean writing what you have (already) lived. You can learn to know what you write, too.