Posts Tagged ‘memoir’
where voice resides: the allergy diaries
There are a few essays so well-written that I could use them to teach each element of craft. Jill Christman’s “The Allergy Diaries” is one of these essays. “The Allergy Diaries” describes Christman’s infant daughter’s anaphylactic reaction to cow’s milk and the aftermath of this discovery. That is the situation in the essay. The real…
Read Moremy new best friend
We went up to my mom’s cabin in Northern Minnesota last weekend, and I took fifteen books with me because my summer Motherhood & Words class starts next week, and I was trying to finalize my reading list. Of course, it’s not humanly possible (if you read as slowly as I do) to get through…
Read Moremoonrise
Penny Wolfson’s essay “Moonrise” (Best American Essays 2002) is the only motherhood essay that I could find when I searched through two decades of Best American Essays. (Someone, please, correct me if I’m wrong—I’d love to be wrong about this.) Is this evidence that most memoirs and essays about motherhood are not taken seriously enough…
Read Morethe reasons we love
A couple of weeks ago, I used an excerpt of Beth Kephart’s A Slant of Sun in class to talk about emotional distance—writing the hard stuff without becoming sentimental. (I also used Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” but I’m not going to talk about that right now.) A Slant of…
Read Moreprematurity, disability, and Past Due
I have been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. On February 20th, there was a story on NPR about the gestationally youngest (known) preemie to survive–ever, anywhere. Her name is Amillia and she was born at 21 weeks and 6 days gestation (a little more than half the gestation of a normal pregnancy).…
Read MoreI love teaching
I love that moment in class when a light goes off for a student or when someone tells me that her writing is going in a completely different direction than she expected. I love being a part of that discovery. (And yes, I do realize that I sound like a sap.) Yesterday we read “Mother…
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