Creative NonFiction

Mike's five

2007-06-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

1. The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson
This is a collection of all Thompson's early journalism, including his writing from South America and the Caribbean while he traveled there dispatching articles to various magazines in the states (around age 22!), his early coverage of the Nixon administration, and everything he wrote for Rolling Stone. The prose is very lean and economical - Thompson is a writer who teaches me a lot about writing itself - and many of the stories, especially The Kentucky Derby one, the Great Shark Hunt, and the one about Washington D.C. burglaries are hilarious.
2. All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald
The subtitle of this is "A Family Story from Southie," (South Boston), but that hardly encapsulates it. The book gives a real feel for the old Southie neighborhood (not unlike the South Philly piece, but much more in depth), for better or worse, and the characters are un-inventably awesome, especially the author's mother. Also touches on some interesting racial history in Boston, with the bussing problems in the 70s and 80s. Sounds corny but the stuff this author has seen and gone through, and the unpretentious, unsolicitous way he presents it will teach you a thing or two about life. It's not long and the writing is trim and easy to read - you can blow through this on a plane ride or a day at the beach...won't take a lot of your time, definitely worth picking up.
3. Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway
A pretty exhaustive examination of the "tragedy" of bullfighting in Spain as Hemingway has known it. Some chapters get a little too technical and in-depth as far as the ins and outs of the art/sport itself, but now and then he allows himself to digress into his experiences in Spain, descriptions of its geography and culture, and general extrapolations from bullfighting to life, and those parts will blow you away; they absolutely make the rest of the book worthwhile. He also adopts a sort of internal conversation technique with an invented listener which, believe it or not, made me laugh out loud (this is Hemingway we're talking about).
If you're only half-motivated and come across this book in a library or bookstore, just read the last chapter - it's full of beautiful descriptions of Spain.
4. The Executive Brain, Elkhonon Goldberg
I am a huge neuro-nerd. If you're at all interested in the brain and the astronomical advances that have been made toward understanding it in the past half-century, you'll like this book. Even if you don't, it's a quick read and will make you feel like you're an expert after you read it. It's not all science - it touches on the possible link between artistic compulsions and neurological disorders, mentioning Poe, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, and others with conditions that likely influenced their art. Fascinating.
5. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
This is in my top three favorite books ever. Allegedly it's a novel, but I believe that its true classification is CNF and in any case anyone who wants to write CNF will benefit from reading it. Like Thompson's prose, its clean, economical style will teach you how to write, and at the same time it's full of interesting sociological observations that Orwell makes as he lives in abject poverty first in Paris and then in London. In Paris he works two restaurant jobs and his descriptions of the back of the house and life among restaurant staff are masterful, insightful, and hilarious. Out of all five books I just listed, I'd recommend this most strongly - the other four are tied to my own interests, but I really think anyone who picks this book up will like it, especially if your curiosity about bars and restaurants was piqued by my piece.

5 books

2007-06-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

see below...

2007-06-11T19:28:00.001-07:00

5 books

2007-06-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

Dispatches by Michael Herr
A book that captures the vietnam war. Pretty much all I have to say about that. Its truly excellent (an referenced in one of the interviews we read)

Chaos by James Gleick
A book that explains the history and concept of chaos, very relevant for pretty much any field and extremely interesting.

New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers by Robert S. Desowitz
An entertaining, approachable and accurate introduction to parasites a topic you never know you were interested in until now...

The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Classic and poetic and ruthless. Easy enough that paris hilton can read it, deep enough that you could spend hours thinking about it.

Rivethead by Ben Hamper
I read this for ihum and have to admit that I liked it. Its about working in an automotive assembly plant in Flint michigan. Michael Moor did a film about this place.

Beth's picks

2007-06-11T14:20:00.000-07:00

1) Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is a wide-ranging book that essentially attempts to explain why there are huge disparities of power and resources between countries and cultures. Diamond covers everything from human evolution to agriculture to conquistadors. I read it a while back and remember being fascinated by his ideas. Take it all with a grain of salt--Diamond's not an expert in everything, though he paints with such a good brush you want to believe it all.

2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks chronicles Sacks's experiences with patients suffering from all kinds of bizarre neurological disorders from being unable to function without music to being unable to feel their own bodies (loss of "proprioception"). It's both detailed and compassionate, a fascinating read.

3) Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose is Ambrose's take on the Lewis and Clark expedition, basically a digest/adaptation of the expedition journals. Riveting. It's amazing those guys survived.

4) In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson is Bryson's account of traveling solo in Australia. It's hilarious, and makes a really good book on tape.

5) Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller is a kind of spiritual autobiography about Miller's experiences with Christianity at Reed College and in Portland, Oregon. Never, ever preachy, and often really insightful. I liked best the scene in which Miller and friends set up a confessional booth on Reed campus--so that they could confess Christianity's sins to their audience!

Five Reads

2007-06-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

1. The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger.
I've mentioned this book on my blog before, as my father was once a swordboat captain and spotter. In what became a blockbuster film, Junger chronicles the 1991 Halloween nor'easter that took the lives of six swordfishermen, interspersed with information about the swordfishing industry as well. If you like this book, check out female swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw's The Hungry Ocean, though it's a rather fluffy read.

2. The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt.
If you were disgusted by Krakauer's account of the deathly May 1996 Everest expedition of which he was a member, this book offers Russian guide Boukreev's side of the story. Though not as well-written as Into Thin Air, I enjoyed reading Boukreev's take on the same situation.

3. Song for the Blue Ocean, by Carl Safina.
This is a beautifully written, brutally honest portrait of the plight of the world's oceans and fisheries. While I find Safina a bit self-absorbed at times, I like how he clearly focuses on bluefin tuna, salmon, and coral reefs to illustrate the enormous environmental challenges we face.

4. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich.
I think Ehrenreich, an educated woman who lived undercover holding various minimum wage jobs, wittily succeeds in illustrating how painfully difficult life is in this country without sufficient income.

5. The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad.
Seierstad, a young female Norwegian journalist, lived with the large extended Khan family (headed by bookseller Sultan Khan) in Afghanistan in 2002. What interested me most was Seierstad's ability as a Westerner to interact not only with Khan's women, but also with the men. Despite its very strong Western bias, I think Seierstad's book offers an interesting perspective on Afghan family life after September 11.

5 Favs

2007-06-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

1. "The Cold War and the Color Line" by Thomas Borstelmann.
I read this book for a class I took this quarter entitled, "20th Century American History". If you are at all interested in race relations, this is a really interesting read and it looks at the issue of race from a novel perspective. Instead of just focusing on the Civil Rights Movement, this book puts the Civil Rights Movement into a larger historical context, the Cold War.

2. "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder.
So, I am a little biased, but you all MUST read this book. It details the life and work of Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health. Partners in Health is a nonprofit organization that works to provide comprehensive health care to the poorest of the poor. This book is incredibly inspirational and the story of Dr. Paul Farmer is very interesting--he is certainly eccentric. Read it to be inspired to do good in the world.

3. "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell
Disclaimer, I have not read this book, but I have heard amazing things about it. The author describes the book as, being "a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us".

4. "Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephan Dubner.
Likewise, I have not read this book. However, it is on my list to read (and has been for quite some time) and I hope that by posting it here, I may actually get around to reading it. Here is an outline of the chapters to give you an idea of what the book talks about.

* Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers (See below)
* Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents
* Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low wages and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers
* Chapter 4: The controversial role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime. (Levitt explored this topic in an earlier paper entitled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.")
* Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education (instead, the authors assert that it is what the parents are, not what they do, that makes a difference)
* Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children

5. "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I haven't actually had this book reccommended to me, but while i was looking up information on the two books listed above, I came across this one and it sounded interesting.

"A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives."

You should also read Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance". I believe I talked about it in a previous blog post, but it is a really good read and especially pertinent to today's politics.

5ive

2007-06-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

1. The Electric Cool-aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
I got this book last summer from the kid behind me in the bookstore buy-back line. I was so intrigued by the title that I had to ask about it... he started explaining and i kept asking questions... finally, he took the hint and handed me the book, no doubt calculating that my shining eyes would be worth more than the 32 cents the bookstore would have given him.
One or two of our assigned readings listed Tom Wolfe and this book as the beginning of New Journalism. The writing is amazing - it reads like a work of fiction, and the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters was really freaking enthralling. The book tries to capture / recreate the experiences and motivations of its characters on and off of acid, and it does a really good job of it.
2. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes - Joan Ryan
This is about the pressures faced by elite level gymnasts and figure skaters. The upside is that the book was a continuous train of real-life shock and awe. For me, a gymnast since age 3, it read almost like a tabloid of all my favorite ex-gymnastic superstars. It brings to light serious issues inherent in these two sports, and in youth athletics in general. The downside is that Ryan definitely has a bias, and i'm not entirely sure if I agree with / believe in it. While it was clearly extensively researched, the subjects chosen might not have represented the most well-balanced view. As an elite athlete myself, I tend toward the "pursue greatness" side of the "purse greatness vs. be well-rounded" debate. Ryan clearly takes the opposite view. All the same, it was a fascinating book to read.
3. Running with Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
Freaking funny. Also, now, a feature full length movie (and how!) Has anyone seen that, by the way? I'm wondering whether the book makes the transition alright...
4. Naked - David Sedaris
Perhaps funnier, even, than Running with Scissors, although I'm down to debate it in class tomorrow.
5. A River Runs Through It - Norman MacLean
This novella is not precisely a nonfiction memoir, but it is not precisely fictional either. It almost won a 1977 Pulitzer Prize in letters, but at the last minute, critics deemed it too close to real life to be considered for the category in which it was nominated. Its beautifully written - in fact, it probably has some of the most beautiful language I've ever read.
Final lines: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters." Good God.

5 Reads

2007-06-04T18:01:00.001-07:00

1. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It's a fascinating, beautifully written book that interweaves literary criticism with her memoirs about the difficulties of life in post-Revolutionary Iran and her reflections on the place of art in a totalitarian world. It's a chance to see some of the "great" Western authors (Austen, Fitzgerald, James, Nabokov) in a new way, although it's a bit scholar-ly at moments. If you read nothing else, pick up a copy of the book somewhere and read the scenes where her students at the university put The Great Gatsby on trial for immorality.

2. There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotolowitz. Not an easy book to read by any means, but it is a compelling story and an important examination of what life was and is still like for kids in the projects. I think it would also be interesting for those of you who want to read a nonfiction work that reads like a novel, where the narrator is not a character at all in teh story. Plus, didn't the interview make you curious?

3. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Talk about doing research for a creative nonfiction piece - Barbara Ehrenreich works minimum wage jobs at WalMart, as a cleaning lady, and in a diner in various cities across the U.S. and tries to get by. Her struggles provide a great deal of insight into class in America, a topic we don't like to talk about much, as she looks at not just how hard it is financially, but the kind of treatment she has to put up with.

4. Savage Inequalities (which I've read most of) or something else by Jonathan Kozol. A popular and accessible writer looking at inequality in American education. He visits schools across the country and reports on race and inequality in them. Worth reading one of his several books on race, class, and how we're failing our kids and ourselves - it's a harsh, but important book.

5. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I was assigned it for spring break in high school and I thought I would hate having to read it. I couldn't put it down. Young reporters taking down a President? It would make great fiction - and yet it's all true. I also recommend renting the movie Dick afterwards; you'll realize what a truly brilliant and detailed piece of satire it is.

Booklist

2007-06-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

A top five (or nine):

1. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen treks with George Schaller, renowned biologist and zoologist, to determine whether the bharal, indigenous to the forbidden Inner Dolpo of Nepal, is a goat or a sheep. A simple premise, and the translucent outer layer over a personal and powerful examination of human action and interaction. I can't read much of this book at once – more than fifty pages in a sitting, or even a day, and I am ruined, turned completely internal, with a sense, somehow, of watching my brain bounce against my skull, against itself, trying to figure out what I think about religion, the cosmos, quests and simplicity, human goals and tricks and drugs, and life. Kind of a tall order. But Matthiessen pulls you always back in, his simple lyricism and incredibly well-researched, but never bombastic, cultural histories woven together into a very honest and very human account.

2. A Moveable Feast and True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway. A Moveable Feast chronicles Hemingway's years in Paris, before success or money, divorce or alcoholism. Achingly clean writing, and in it's near starkness, searing. True at First Light sits at the other end of the timeline. Published after Hemingway's death, it is his "fictional memoir" of his life in Africa. Not quite as pure, and a fascinating form – it could all be fiction and it all feels true.

3. Tender at the Bone, Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl. The first and third parts of Reichl's memoirs (the second, Comfort Me With Apples is high on my summer to-do list). Reichl was the food critic for the New York Times, and is now the Editor in Chief at Gourmet. And has had a crazy life. Much of this is sad, and always open, unflinchingly revealing of every mistake and every misjudgment. And there are recipes. This is my comfort reading.

4. The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, Jim Harrison. More food, and some nice examinations of American culture. Somewhat dated (since it's a compilation of articles written over the last twenty or so years) but very funny. Makes you want to eat a lot, write a lot, and drink a lot. Moderation, Harrison has not been about. A collection that makes you realize how much there is to live.

5. High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver. A set of interrelated essays from the novelist Kingsolver. Funny, in a slightly absurdist way.

6. Irons in the Fire, John McPhee. This I just bought, and have only read the title essay. Makes me want to go find my own equivalent of modern-day cow rustling and investigate like crazy.

Noah's five picks

2007-06-04T02:57:00.001-07:00

1. A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
This is a very self-aware book. I think it is awesome. Also you should read it because you are in college and it is hip as hell.

2. The Great Shark Hunt By Hunter S. Thompson
A great collection of short and long pieces by Hunter S. This includes my favorite essay by Thompson which is a feature on the Kentucky Derby. It is gonzo journalism at its finest.

3. Killing Yourself to Live By Chuck Klosterman
This book chronicles a journey to many of the sites of famous rock and roll deaths. Klosterman investigates the connection between fame and death in a somewhat dark and very entertaining odyssey.

4. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
An great travel writing piece about an epic rail journey across all of Asia.

5. My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber
This is a brief yet very interesting Autobiography. It is highly stylized and unclear what its relation to the truth is exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Miki's Five Picks

2007-06-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

1. Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. In this best-seller, the author blends personal and investigative journalism to take the reader on a journey following each of the food chains that sustain us. He traces the origins of industrial food, organic food, and the food we forage ourselves from source to plate, creating a definitive account of the American diet. This is a terrific book for all those foodies out there, or really anyone who is curious about where the hell our food comes from!

2. The Cure, by Geeta Anand. Pulitzer-Prize Winning author Anand tells the unbelievable story of how John Crowley raised $100 Million to save his two youngest children who were diagnosed with Pompe disease and given only 5 months to live. Refusing to accept these death sentences, Crowley quit his job as a marketing exec. and invested everything he had in creating a biotech start-up to find a cure.

3. Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert, at the age of 30, had seemingly everything she could want -- a successful career, a loving husband -- but she was still unhappy. This book is about how she gave it all up: got rid of her material belongings, quit her job and left everyone she loved behind to travel the world (specifically Italy, India and Indonesia) on a quest of self-exploration.

4. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, by Tucker Max. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is about the life of Tucker Max, an infamous womanizer and pretty much all-around jerk. I actually just learned about the book this evening while browsing the New York Times Review of Books.

Here is a description of the book and a little bit about the author, excerpted from Amazon.com:

My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world.

About the Author
Tucker Max received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1998. He attended Duke Law School on an academic scholarship, where he graduated with a J.D. in 2001 (despite the fact that he neglected to buy any of his textbooks for his final two years and spent part of one semester—while still enrolled in classes—living in Cancun). Tucker is purportedly the reason Duke dropped from 7 to 11 in the USN&WR rankings during his tenure. He currently lives in Chicago, and when he isn't drinking or fornicating, he writes for his website.

Apparently those stories about him from Law School are true! (One of the people who posted a comment on the Amazon.com website went to the Law School with Max and verified the details.) As the reviews indicate, some people love him, others downright loathe him. I think the book sounds like a hilarious read either way!

5. My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness, by Lennard Davis. This book is about Davis' experiences growing up as a hearing child of deaf parents. Described as a "liaison between sound and silence," Davis recalls the joys and confusions of this reality, as well as the complex relationships he shared with his mother and father, both of whom were working-class, Jewish immigrants.

Five Books

2007-06-03T03:15:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone... I think we're supposed to post up five suggestions for creative non-fiction books to read. Here goes:

My first book recommendation is The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time by David Vise and Mark Malseed. It follows the founders through the start-up phase through becoming a big business and tells all the amazing never-before-been-done things that Google did.

The second book is Looking Forward to It: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process by Stephen Elliott. It tells of how he followed a campaign but it is told in a very entertaining and narrative way. I haven’t read all of it, but I went to a reading where he read part of it-- you can take a look at it on Google Book Search.

My third book is less academic… you’ve probably heard of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which is an anthology of true stories meant to be uplifting that are submitted by various people.

Fourth is thanks to my roommate, who is Tibetan. The book is The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama by Thomas Laird. Again, I haven’t read the entire book, but it follows Laird in a series of question-and-answer sessions with the Dalai Lama about the history of Tibet and the political implications that the historical view has on the present. Laird doesn’t just transcribe, he also re-tells and interprets the history himself.

Another serious book that I was exposed to by my roommate: The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, by Xinran Xue. This book tells of Xinran’s travels and the women she meets, most of whom have had traumatizing experiences because of men.

retro pop culture

2007-05-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

only because my paper references this:

http://www.retrojunk.com/details_commercial/499/

has anyone seen this commercial before? i thought it was a pretty ubiquitous pop culture meme (simpsons, futurama have both referenced it... hence the logic!) until i talked to some people about it.

in any case, what's this guy doing on a new jersey shore in 1989?

You know you're famous when...

2007-05-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

...you're on the SAT.

So I teach and tutor high school SAT prep, and – lo and behold – there in the error-identification section of The Official SAT Study Guide, was John Edgar Wideman, not agreeing with his verb.

Needless to say, it took a little explaining to account for my shout of recognition and joy. But clearly someone at College Board knows what – or at least who – they're talking about.

Three Ideas

2007-04-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

1. My mother and I have always had a complex relationship that has ranged from periods of hate – during which we would not speak – to times of friendship so close that we were barely separable. In high school, I wrote a play with “fictional” characters (that were basically us only with different names) that described some of the agony that I experienced in our relationship at that point, but I don’t think it really probed deep enough. After years of ups and downs between us, I think it is time that I explore the layers of complexity that underlie our relationship and what keeps this bond so strong yet turbulent. It is an issue that will be important to my own growth, largely because I think that the need to claim independence from my mother remains one of the main tensions between us. It will be a challenge to make this piece not feel like one long psychotherapy session, and this is definitely not my aim. I would like it to be an honest exploration of what I feel to be our unique connection, with a consideration of what other relationships between mothers and daughters are like. Perhaps interviewing some of my girlfriends about their relationships with their mothers would be an alternative (and safer) direction to take this topic. This link goes to an NPR show on mother-daughter “speak” that features a book by Deborah Tannen about relationships between mothers and their daughters.

2. All of my grandparents have interesting stories from the Holocaust. For many years I have been absorbed with the story of my mother’s father, the Auschwitz survivor, but have neglected to learn more about what happened to my mother’s mother and my father’s father, both of whom are still living. I would like to chronicle one of their stories, and perhaps take a large probe into learning about what happened to their entire hometown populations. I have found the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, very inspiring. It is about a young man who returns to his Russian roots to meet the woman who saved his grandfather. Although it is fiction, it exudes the same sense of urgency in wanting to explore one’s heritage. This project would require that I interview my grandparent further on the phone, look at old photos, if they are available, and listen to any tape recordings that they have made. I would like to explore how my grandmother or grandfather’s experience – though remote from my life – has managed to shape the person that I am today. Can I see any of myself in them?

3. This is probably the most difficult of all the topics for me to write about. Over the last few years my health has deteriorated in more ways than I can imagine, and each time I seem to get better another part of my body turns against me. For the longest time I could not cope. I hated my body and myself. I blamed God and the rest of the world and refused not only to be thankful for whatever health I did have left, but also that I would have to be the one to take responsibility for healing myself. I would like to explore my how I have grown, over time, to accept and love my body (well, at least most of the time), and to see the bright side of what has been an utterly dark period in my life. There are many different stories and angles I could take within this topic, and that is something that I would have to consider further. Recently I have come across a messaging board online where people with the same medical condition (a very acute form of IBS) have been engaging in discussions, and I have found it extremely helpful and therapeutic to interact in this setting. I think that possibly integrating others’ reactions to living this kind of life might be instructive, or at least help spawn ideas of how to best tackle this difficult topic for me.

i propose

2007-04-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

NAIL SALON

when i was a child, my mother took me to her nail salon on days i didn't have school and we didn't have a baby sitter. i spent a lot of time wandering between the isles of the manicurists, entertaining their customers for quarters i could use at the arcade. as i grew up and became more observant of my surroundings, i learned that the salon was more of a social gathering for my mom and her friends (and family) than a place of business. money was exchanged for services, but what the patrons really were paying for was the comfort of having someone hold your hand and massage your concerns. my mother knew this, and attempted to make everyday at work a feel good episode of Ricki Lake. i want to explore how the nail salon became such an integral part of my personality, my values, and my mischief growing up.

LAS VEGAS

spring break was pretty wild: i spent 4 nights in Vegas and emerged an empty shell of a man. the experience drained me of all my cash, values, and seratonin. however, if it were financially viable, i would book a flight back every weekend for the rest of my life. i want to explore how such a contrived little city can become the den of sin, pulling us back into its fantasy land and tricking us into forsaking our money (and souls). i want to dive deeper into this meretricious relationship, and explore the consequences of excessive drug use and strippers as a leisurely activity.

CHRIS FARLEY

when i was in 8th grad, my buddy Ify and I didn't have enough money for the bus ride home, so we walked across the street to the local hospital to ask people for quarters. as we were waiting for patients to reemerge into the waiting room--few carried loose change or wallets for that matter under their pocketless hospital gowns, an oversight on our part--Ricki Lake suddenly came back from a commercial break on TV to announce the death of Chris Farley, my then childhood hero. years later, i learned that he died of an overdose of cocaine and heroin. my love only deepened.

i want to explore how chris farley's death affected my middle school sensibilities at the time, and shaped how i perceive death, drugs, and comedy today.

3 Possible Avenues

2007-04-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

idea #1: the difficulty of taking time to figure things out--the forces in my life preventing me from doing this

I spent the past summer in Ecuador and I expected it to be life changing. Now that I am back in the states I cannot point to any concrete way in which the experience changed me. I want to explore how/if my time in Ecuador altered my perspective and if it did not, I want to figure out why the experience didn’t affect me. The poverty was real and in my face, and yet today I sit comfortably in my dorm room and have the luxury of worrying about fitting in a run today.

For a bit of background on the situation with street children in Ecuador, you can go to this website.

idea #2:
In an effort to understand myself, I think it is appropriate to start at the beginning. My life between ages three and eight was full of events that I am sure affected me in profound ways—I just don’t know what those ways are. I want to tease out the connections between the events that occurred during those five years of my life and the events that have occurred during the past five years of my life. The early life events I would explore would include: being hospitalized for a week at age 3, the birth of my sister, the migraines, entering school, my parents divorce, and the sale of our summer house. I would try to link my personal development in the past five years to these early life events.

Click here to learn about Kawasaki Disease (which I had)!

idea #3:
Stanford. I love it, I truly do. As I am about to enter my last year here I want to make the most of it. It is so easy to adapt a pigeon-holed viewpoint because there is so much to take in, but I think this piece would be a wonderful opportunity to step back and take Stanford in as a whole—its people, its scenery, its culture. Every place has its own unique feel and I would like to capture that about Stanford through insight into the lives of Stanford students. I also hope this piece would offer a critique of Stanford. The critique would not be scathing, but rather it would help myself and my readers to better understand why things are the way they are around here.

My freshman year there was a big outcry over an article written by Sarah Ball, a profro, bemoaning the superficiality of Stanford Admit weekend. I tihnk this would be an interesting place to start this piece.

Ideas X 3!

2007-04-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

My first idea is quite large, so I’ll probably have to par down the topic a lot. For three months recently I was a wandering nomad, traveling through different cities and living with different friends. I’m still quite flummoxed by why I did that. I would like to explore what led me to make that decision, and why I decided to stop. Along the way, I discovered how existentially disorienting being without a consistent home is.

For my setting exercise, I wrote about my freshman dorm experience. It started off as an exploration of how a bunch of people, cut off from everything and everyone they’d known, managed to make friends with one another. Eventually, the piece focused and more on me, and my experience. Before long, I realized that my piece was actually about how a romantic failure impeded my ability to feel like I was part of a social safety net. I would like to explore the issue of loneliness and longing in the context of the freshman dorm experience. What about the freshman dorm experience makes feelings like loneliness and longing different?

Another topic I’d really like to explore is mental health care insurance. Through personal experience and talking with other people, I’ve realized just how much the cards are stacked against patients when it comes to mental health insurance. Considering it’s such a massive topic, I want to just focus on the first, and hardest step of receiving mental health care: calling up your insurance. I would like to explore how dehumanizing and disorienting the process is: just finding who to call is difficult (most insurance companies now outsource the mental health care portion, so you’ll probably have to be transferred several times and put on hold several times), calling some disembodied person in some unknown location who then asks you incredibly invasive questions after talking for a couple minutes (“How is your libidio?”), with the whole process finishing up with being assigned a “Patient Number,” which is now your 7-digit identity in the mental health care world. We’re all used to the alienation of technology in the contemporary world, but I think that for people seeking mental health care, and who are probably more sensitive to feelings of dehumanization than most, that the impersonality of the process is a major impediment to people who would otherwise seek help. My idea for this came from this story.

David Halberstam, 1934-2007

2007-04-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

David Halberstam was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and nonfiction author. He covered a variety of historical events and periods in insightful and provocative ways, including time in Vietnam as a war correspondent. I read The Fifties for class when I was in high school, and it was completely different from other history texts I'd read. Here's an essay of his called "Generations" reflecting on his family. He died Monday in a car crash in Menlo Park.

proposals

2007-04-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

There is currently a huge birding festival going on in Kansas. I would like to use this event as the center of a piece about environmentalism and agriculture, and about the disconnect (and often disrespect) between people who shop at whole foods and people who grow food. I would incorporate stories of visiting the state, talking with my family about their farm, and meeting their business associates. I would like touch on how agriculture and environmentalism share common interests, bring up progress that has been made in conservation, and discuss where conflict still exists. I see this as thought provoking and more of a reflection on culture than any sort of definitive statement about what should be done to save the earth, but I would like to include a fair amount of factual information. This is a topic I know enough about to have opinions but I would want to research further to expand it beyond my personal experience. I found the website for the birding festival. I found it somewhat uninspiring. I can no longer do links so I'll post a picture and you can copy and paste the URL if you're interested.

http://www.visitgreatbend.com/wnw.html

I would like to write a piece about windsurfing. I know I want to share the experience of the sport. Its not that common and there is a huge disconnect between having tried it once or twice and really windsurfing. To have really been windsurfing you have to have been hydroplaning and it's an unbelievable feeling. I think it is fairly common to have an activity or an interest that has a huge impact on who you are. For me, writing about windsurfing could end up touching on a lot of topics. So many in fact that I’m finding it impossible to list them all here and I am not sure where this piece would go. I’ve windsurfed since I was in middle school so there is a lot of ground to cover. I will say that although I enjoy many activities, windsurfing was the thing that inspired me to challenge myself, to commit to really wanting to be better at something, to take responsibility in a way that I hadn’t before, and to do a lot of internal reflection. There is also a lot about windsurfing culture that made me very critical of the way people interact with each other but I think that may be a separate topic. The link is to a video of freestyle windsurfing. The music is a little sleepy but I chose it because I like Wyatt.

http://www.windwing.com/dnn/NEWS/WINDSURFINGNEWS/VideoWindsurfing/tabid/94/Default.aspx

I would like to write a piece about a friend of mine from high school. We spent almost all our time together. He was one of the smartest people I know and one of the most absurd. Prone to getting into arguments with the teachers and half the students in the school, and fights with his parents (His mom once refused to drive him to the bus stop so he opened his nalgene of water and poured it out on her head as she lay in bed. The next day his parents changed the locks on his house without telling him). A month or so ago I got a letter from the US government as part of a background check although I’ve barely heard from him for years. Apparently he is trying to work for them as a “contractor” and although I have called and sent him facebook messages, and emails I have yet to hear from him. This would be sort of a literary portrait. Hopefully humorous. I don't think a link is appropriate in this case.

potential adventures

2007-04-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm a diver, and my greatest goal is to earn a medal at the 2008 Olympics. This journey requires not only rigerous training, but also quite a bit of soul searching. My personality is pretty low-key - I'm happy to compromise, and i'm relatively content no matter what. My coach worries that I don't want it enough - he says I'm too "stable" to be really good - I don't "want" to win enough, and I don't get miserable enough when I lose because there are so many other things that make me happy. Even my dad, with whom I share my easygoing outlook on life, says he has "never seen an olympic champion who wasn't sort of a freak." This is a link to the website of a good friend of mine, Laura Wilkinson, who's won gold medals at the Olympics and World Championships. I think that looking at the personal websites and journals of others who have made / are making the same journey as I am might help me.

My 18-year-old brother lives in the same house with my parents. Mom cooks food for him, does his laundry, provides him with lunch and gas money, and still tries to "mother" him when it comes to grades, behavior, and future plans, but she can't. Kyle hasn't spoken to either of my parents beyond "shut up" and "Get the fuck out of here," in 3 or 4 years. I have no idea what they've done to deserve this, or what makes him so angry toward his parents - I get along with him fine, and for the most part, he does ok with the outside world. I want to explore the cause of his anger (after all, we were raised by the same two people, and I've never felt anything that would incite me to treat people as he does) and maybe my own guilt - was there something I could have done? is this the result of growing up in my shadow? Should I step in more as a liason between my brother and family? I can only imagine how miserable home is when i'm not around, but I never find the time to go home...

I really wish I could believe in a God because it seems like belief adds a lot to the lives of believers. There's something both motivating and comforting in the idea that there's a larger power that presides over us all. I can't do it though - in my mind, faith and reason are mutually exclusive, and I value reason much too highly to let my mind give in to faith. In general I am rational, methodical, and slow to really give myself over to any emotion or belief, and that tends to make me judgmental of religious people at the same time as I sort of envy them. In this essay, I'd like to look at my own religious "history, " and maybe also research alternative views of a higher power that I can believe in. Calculating God, by Robert Sawyer, is a work of fiction, but proposes ideas that really intregue me about where we came from and what we're doing here.

Project Proposals

2007-04-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'd like to explore the topic of teen depression. My sister overdosed on painkillers two months ago and spent a week in a psych ward afterward. She’s a smart, talented high schooler with plenty of friends and a good home life, but she felt worthless and trapped. I want to explore the feeling of guilt that I had afterward and how her action reflects on my family and on teenagers. Psychiatrists call her actions “a cry for help” and say chemical imbalances are the main cause of her depression. It bothers me that she should be subject to something like this possibly for the rest of her life, and I want to understand more how depression works, who it affects, and how they cope.

Ecological issues from global warming to recycling to the Leave No Trace wilderness ethic seem like ones that everyone can play a part in with tiny choices, but I have very intelligent friends who don't see the connection between their choices and the environment. I recently went backpacking with a friend who found it mind-boggling that I would pack out our organic trash. I care about protecting natural resources, but also understand the basic inertia that makes people ignore the steps they can take to make a difference, and I want to explore the tension between these two in my habits and the habits of others. I want to figure out what convinces people to care, and what makes them ignore the environmental consequences of their actions.

I ended up describing my church in response to the prompt about place, and I'd like to explore the kinds of music that I've encountered over the years in worship services. I've been in services with everything from chants and hymns to rap and rock (see the "Contemporary Christian Music" movement), and have discovered that there are many ways to worship; though I find I have specific preferences, I'm not opposed to a variety of ways. The fact that worship is both a ceremony and a personal encounter intrigues me, and makes me wonder what enables people to make the experience communal and personal at the same time. American churches have been debating "proper" worship music for at least the last decade, and I'd like to explore what's at stake for churches when they choose music, and how different kinds of music are meaningful.

My Ideas

2007-04-25T04:18:00.000-07:00

ONE
Raised a Unitarian Universalist, articulating my way of life is often rather bewildering— both for me and my listener. An extremely liberal faith, the Unitarian church attracts members from all walks of life and is one of the few to perform same-sex marriages. In eighth grade I wrote my credo establishing my world vision at the time, incorporating principles from Quakerism, Zen Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Native American spirituality. And I’ve attended an unsupervised Unitarian youth conference on an island off the coast of New Hampshire for the past seven summers. Unitarianism has shaped countless aspects of my life, and I’d like to learn more about its history (particularly the merger between the Unitarians and Universalists in 1961), but most importantly write about my experiences growing up UU.

Link: Click here to read about the Unitarian Universalist Association.

TWO
Over the past sixty years, my father has lived in Naples, Karachi, Guatemala, and Nova Scotia but ultimately settled only 5.2 miles down the road from where his parents called home. An “aging hippie,” he’s operated his own bell-making business, spent many years as a swordboat captain and spotter flying miniature airplanes, and is now an engineer. He’s lived with his fluorescent green Amazon parrot Hondo longer than he’s been married to my mom. But by far my father’s greatest accomplishment is the 50-foot steel sailboat he’s been building for half his life, finally to be launched this June. My dad has taught me to pursue my dreams with passion and perseverance, and because he’s always wanted to write his memoir but never had the time, I would love to begin.

Link: In the 70s my dad graced the cover of National Fisherman, though I couldn’t find the link. Click here to read about Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, a detailed portrait of the lives of modern swordfishermen later turned into a Blockbuster film. (I say “modern” because since my father’s time swordfishing has shifted from harpooning to longlining.)

THREE
Last summer, I lived in Salemi, Sicily for six weeks on an archaeological dig. Every weekend, I took advantage of my surroundings, booking hostel reservations, train, bus, and ferry tickets on a limited budget and in another language. Not only did I stand at the summit of Mount Etna, climb the Greek theatres of Taormina and Siracusa, explore the seaside ruins of Selinunte, wander through the medieval town of Érice, shimmy into a dripping, dark cave to view Neolithic paintings on the island of Levanzo, snorkel in Ustica’s turquoise “Blue Grotto,” and frequent the bustling markets in Palermo, but I also considered traveling across jam-packed Sicily at the height of the tourist season an intriguing anthropological study of Europeans on holiday. I also experienced my share of hilarious semi-disasters (riding from one side of the island to the other in a cramped bus with 30 Sicilian men at 4 AM after our train had broken down, chugging through a four-hour hailstorm on a hydrofoil, for example). Though I kept a brief journal, I’d be thrilled with the opportunity to reflect and write about my travels.

Link: Click here to visit my favorite town in Sicily, Cefalù! For photos, click on “Galleria fotografica” on the lower right.

Some Thoughts

2007-04-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

1. For my "place" assignment, I started writing about the community theater where I spent many, many hours in middle school and high school rehearsing for and performing in shows. I want to explore both the characters that inhabited the place backstage (retired couple, the Italian comic who made amazing balloon animals, the fifteen year old borderline exhibitionist....) and how I experienced growing up there, amongst these strange people. I am really interested in the sort of community of misfits that always seemed to form there and why, for some reason, it always made me feel so at home, even though I was never particularly gifted at being onstage. For fun: the link to the Coastal Repertory theater in Half Moon Bay.

2. Public service has, in the course of my college career, gone from being an extracurricular, volunteer pastime to being a professional aspiration. Looking back on three summers of (paid) service - as a camp counselor for low-income high school students, as a researcher on a community redevelopment effort in San Diego, as a multipurpose intern for a philanthropic fund in San Jose - I think an essay could be an interesting way to explore what challenges me about those experiences and why they continue to have such a pull on me. So much so that I can't even really imagine doing anything else now with at least the next few years of my life. I'm not sure when or how that happened and perhaps that the reason for writing this.

3. I'd write about crossword puzzles and about doing crossword puzzle with my dad, sometimes my grandma, sometimes with a friend in econ lecture. It could be fun to do some research and learn more about where crossword puzzles come from, how they differ in different cultures, why people do them. (My dad once said that a good test of being culturally and ligustically fluent, at least in Western cultures, is being able to do the puzzles in the newspaper. For example, the British do cryptic crosswords, which I didn't understand until I found that link). It would also be, though, perhaps about my relationship with my dad and what it is about going home now, when he has saved up all the New York Times Sunday puzzles when I'm at school, and why we do them. Or maybe about that moment when you get the gimmick in the puzzle. Or maybe all of it.

Three ideas

2007-04-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

1. I'd like to write about my job over the past year in Boston, and in restaurants in general, where most of my jobs have been since age 15 - but this last one in particular. There are so many observations and people I want to write about, from the cleaning guy who washes the floors at night to the line cook who sells drugs to anyone in the restaurant who wants them (and who, once he left to work at a restaurant two blocks away but wanted to keep his business at our place, tried to employ me to distribute the stuff) to the bartenders and waiters who became like family to me. I’d also like to talk about the value of working a job like this before you get out of college and not after, and raise the possibility that college is not for everyone. I found, for instance, that I read more voraciously and wrote more prolifically while I was stopped out from school than I did when I was enrolled as an English major. My productivity in Boston led me to the notion that just because you’re smart enough to get into college and your family can afford to send you, it doesn’t mean you should go. As for a link, there's a great site where employees rate restaurants they've worked at and people looking for industry jobs can read some brutally honest stuff about places they're looking into, but I can't remember what the hell it's called. I don't want to give the website of the place I worked, at least not til I know just how much I'm gonna be saying about the it. Here is some sort of industry journal thing which I know nothing about except that it's a link, and I need one.

2. I’d also like to write about suicide. When Tom suggested that we not only look to our past for ideas, but also to new things that we can go out and research for the first time, I was mulling over a suicide on campus at the time, and that’s when this idea occurred to me. I can think of a number of angles to come at this from – looking at historical figures who have killed themselves (maybe one would be enough, and tell his story in an unfolding narrative), suicide among college students here at Stanford or nationwide (though the research there could be tough), or a more clinical psychological perspective on suicide in general. Then in between, I’d splice in a narrative of my own experience with this phenomenon, sort of how Wideman talks interspersedly about his own perspective on Emmett Till and what he’s meant in the author’s life, while also telling the more concretely factual story of Till’s murder in a steady progression throughout the piece. Of course I’d be prepared to discuss and explain whatever I write so that no one feels obligated to refer me to a therapist just because I’m talking personally about suicide. Also, I aim for humor in most of my pieces, and I’d like to play around with the challenge of infusing some into such a dark subject (Nick Hornby and Chuck Klosterman have both done it pretty successfully). This is the APA's official guidelines for assessing suicidal patients.

3. I think I speak for most heterosexual men when I say that I am constantly thinking about women. And not just sex, but relationships too (mostly sex, though). One facet of my daily life at home, I found, was that I was constantly getting nervous around random girls that I’d encounter – barista at the café, girl in line at the post office, waitress at the diner, girl on the subway, the sidewalk, the bus – as if something was going to happen between us, even though we were complete strangers; why do I do this? Out of boredom? To alleviate some kind of mental exhaustion? For fun? I’ve found that when I confess these disposable daily crushes to other guys, they always agree with me, so I feel like there is a way to extrapolate and not just talk about myself the whole time. It’s tough, though, to write about this without avoiding therapist’s couch prose – the description in Tell It Slant of that kind of writing absolutely nailed some of my journal entires about this subject. I'd try to make it more about transient attractions in general than just my own, and as for narrative, I've got plenty of disasters to share. I’m really not sure about a link here, I’ll get back to you on that.

Project Proposals

2007-04-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

ONE
I am consistently drawn to the books of male mid-life crisis. Oh, there is such a genre. Those straight talking, usually spare, writers who show you their turmoil again and again, though they will never say that trouble outloud. Hemingway, Carver, McGuane, Harrison, O’Brien. When I read women writers – Annie Proulx or, my far and away favorite, A.M. Homes – they are usually writing about the same thing. Why am I fascinated with forty-year-old men with issues?
Of course, I began to read these books for the same reason I began to listen to Led Zeppelin. My dad did it. He gave me The Old Man and the Sea on the way to Florida, he talked about Panama while we were in the keys. But he doesn’t know I’ve read Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked six times, excerpted it like it was my Bible. He hasn’t seen the tremendous weight these authors lay of my bookshelves – if you took away all their books, and all the others of similar theme, two-thirds of my collection would be gone. I don’t tell him these things. I do not know why.
I want to explore this strange secrecy. I want to look back at the most vivid memories I have of my father and me, alone and with others – battling each other and battling the world. The image of my drunken dad with my mom squished on his lap in the backseat of the car; of the ten hour drive from Yosemite to Las Vegas, when he and my brother and I were on our way to raft in Utah; of the leering eyes of store proprietors in Palm Springs’ art deco shopping strip, as I walked down the block, skinny and sixteen, next to my flip-flop wearing dad. What are these books about? What do I see in them? And if I read them for him, why can I never tell him about them?

TWO
I never used to write in my books. I refused, point-blank, to annotate anything. Then I spent a month with Becca, borrowed her copy of Everything is Illuminated, and have not been able to pick up a book without a pen in hand since. In the month we traveled, she undid a lifetime habit. My swim coach used to tell us that it takes 300 repetitions to set a habit, and 900 to break one. How many pages is that?
Dublin-Berlin-Krakow-Budapest-Igrane-Rome-Venice. Through the lens of the books we read, shared, talked about, analyzed, and underlined, I want to go back through that month of travel where everything – from the fact that gelato cost 70 cents in Berlin, but a euro fifty in Venice (and wasn’t even available after eight o’clock at night in Krakow), to the cumin and nutmeg smell of Budapest’s clean streets – seemed significant.

THREE
The end of college – and the safety of full time studenthood – is constantly closer. I don’t know if I am scared or exuberant about it. Can the freedom to do everything overcome the pressure to do everything right?
I want to figure out my feelings about this, not by examining my own life, since that has clearly not shed any real light on the subject, but by putting down on paper (or screen) what I know about my host mother’s. For three months I lived in Nicole’s home; for three months we went grocery shopping and cooked dinner and sent text messages to each other on our way home on the metro; for three months she told me the story of her life. She is a Tunisian Jew, twice divorced, twice a mother, twice a grandmother. She used to dance, she used to paint, and she is capable of delivering the longest speeches on theoretical dating I have ever heard. Her life is fantastic, if not always happy. And for three months, I looked at all the photo albums while Nicole dipped graceful teaspoons into demitasse yogurt containers and told all the different futures she had lived.

Proposal

2007-04-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

1. I Wrestled in high school in Albuquerque NM, from when I was an eight grader till I graduated. Through this experience I witnessed incredible bonds from between the teammates. I also witnessed the lengths to which people would go to compete. I myself lost fifteen pounds to wrestle 125 pounds my senior year. I would like to explore the journey from 140 pounds downward. Showing the effects mentally of cutting weight, the motivation, I would also like to discuss the physiology to change the tone. This piece would follow me through my senior season and would both explore the world of high school wrestling and critique the intensity which the sport now embodies. I included a link here from my home newspaper, which is a photo montage from the most recent state tournament.

2. Recently I have created an alter ego. This Alter ego is a fictitious younger brother named Calvin Syme. Using this as an alias I participated in the most recent fraternity rush. I would like to write about this experience. The first thing this essay would contain would be some commentary on creating an alter ego. I felt terrible lying to some peoples faces and very happy to lie to others. I think there is something to be said about morals here. Another thing that this essay would contain would be a representation of the surreal world that is Rush. It is one of the fakest setting I have ever been part of. I also my discuss the history of fraternities on Stanford campus. In any case I think the experience of Calvin Syme says something interesting. Here I have included a link to the most recent rush prospectus. The document that tells all the freshman about the various fraternities.

3. I have been learning to surf in the past couple years. My travels have taken from San Diego, to Hawaii, to Costa Rica (twice), and to Australia. I would like to write a travel piece. Less about what I found at each place, which was various oceans and more various people, but more about the search. The search for waves is a quest that more than one person has undergone. I would like to view my own search through the lens of the period of my life in which it has occurred. This is namely a period of failed relationships, lowering academic expectations and a growing obsession with the film Point Break. Point Break may serve as a mirror for my own travels (meant somewhat ironically, but only somewhat). I would hope to create a rich landscape of beaches as well as a rich landscape of emotional change. Here is a link to the Amazon site for Point Break it should give you some insight as to the tone of this piece.

Three Whimsically Titled Ideas

2007-04-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

Idea #1: Friendship in the Sands

Though what I can remember of high school now seems like a blur of homework and awkwardness, I made some of the best friends that I’ve ever had. I would like to go back and explore the complex relationships that were at work in my group of friends. Half of us were dating the other half, which made for some complicated situations. In particular, I am thinking about exploring a school project for which my friends and I hiked about a mile into the Oso Flaco sand dunes to film, carrying all of our equipment and props, including my pet rabbit. Our goal was to walk so far into the sand dunes that no trace of civilization would be visible for the filming, which we accomplished, perhaps without realizing the implications for the walk back. This experience strained (or perhaps ultimately strengthened) friendships and acted as a catalyst for some of the major changes in our group dynamics. You can check out some information about those majestic and treacherous sand dunes to get an idea of what we went through.

Idea #2: Spring Break Introspection

Over spring break, I took a road trip with a large group of people, some of whom were close friends and others that I didn’t know as well. I spent so much time trying to organize the logistics of the trip that I didn’t stop to examine how I felt about what we’d be doing. The trip forced me to examine my own views on alcohol and gamboling. Sometimes I would notice that I didn’t have the same carefree attitude that my friends had, but at the same time I didn’t feel I could express what I was feeling without ruining everyone else’s good time. I would like to go back and reexamine the events as a way of approaching how my family and how I see alcohol and gamboling. You can take a look at the casino games and ambiance of the hotel we stayed at.

Idea #3: Writing About Writing

The first piece of information that I learned about the Virginia Tech tragedy was that the killer was an English major who wrote violent scripts. One of my friends sent me an instant message telling me that I should put disclaimers in all of my writing. As an English and Film Studies major who write stories that are generally action/adventure and have violence in them, the recent shooting and the subsequent focus on the shooter’s violent scripts has given me a lot to think about as far as what I write. I usually look at my writing in terms of what I see in movies like Spiderman or Alien vs. Predator-- nothing serious, just cartoon-like explosions and comic book-style action-- but the events made me feel very uncomfortable about my own writing. I would be interested in examining the historical moment of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in the context of my own life. I also want to look at the conversations I’ve had with friends about this subject. You can take a look at the disturbing scripts that the shooter wrote here.

Proposals for My Essay

2007-04-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

As a teenager, I spent a lot of weekend’s working as event staff for an open air flea market. I feel as though there’s enough distance now to consider writing the experience down for others to see. I’d like to take my most vivid memories, along with the old journal entries I have, and re-create the scenario that motivated me to take the job. The link here is a link filled with information from collectors who enjoy flea markets.
When I was walking home with my older sister in high school, I was informed my father had been taken away by ambulance. He’d had a high fever, and is elderly. I’d like to relive that experience again in order to explain my curious relationship with my father. This link here details exactly how a fever might be a serious warning sign.
I’d like to write about my mother’s experience as an immigrant, especially her time going to night school in order to learn English. It took her away from her family (including a newly born girl), and even though I was just a kid I could notice just how tense she was all of the time. This link contains teaching materials used by ESL teachers.

Travel and Food Advice

2007-04-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, we've all at the very least glanced at a food or travel magazine (they're free in airplanes, quoted on the food channel, etc), so we're familiar with the form. It's this familiarity that makes THIS so funny.

I know we did funny last week, but I really liked the silliness in the direct, reporting style that we are all acquainted with.

Best Page in the Universe and Tucker Max

2007-04-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

http://maddox.xmission.com/

This guy (Maddox) writes hilarious and biting commentaries in his blog about everything from critiquing children's drawings to "how to spot a pedophile" (they have a pedo-smile!). His writings pack a lot of heat (read: anger), though the vulgar language may be offensive to many.

Tucker Max, on the other hand, is less about anger and more about shameless drunken adventures often involving some outrageous series of events that usually leads to an even more ridiculous conclusion.

Both of these writers are self-described assholes, which I think makes them both an interesting read. Though morally reprehensible, their low brow humour is honest and unpretentious.

comedy, nonfiction, truth, and silliness

2007-04-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

Standup Comedy and Creative Nonfiction definitely share some artistic borders. Both are defined by people who present themselves before audiences and speak or write from personal recollection. Both seem to require a large amount of personal honesty and willingness to share.

One of the big reasons why people find comedy funny is the audience's sense that all of these jokes really did happen to the speaker. The great majority of jokes begin with personal statements like, "I was walking to the supermarket the other day," or "So I have this crazy Aunt Margaret..." Rarely do we here, "So I have this friend who has a crazy Aunt Margaret," or "I was thinking, what if someone walked through the supermarket and ____ happened, it would be funny..." We derive a lot more enjoyment out of laughing at the misfortunes of others we know than laughing at the misfortunes of others we haven't been intruced to, or at misfortunes that haven't actually happened to anyone.

If you ask a comedian where he or she gets their jokes, they'll most likely tell you that it's "personal experience." Now I'm sure a lot of their repertoire does come from personal experience, but I'm also sure that a lot of it doesn't, and of the "true" stuff, I'm guessing that a lot of details have been added or expanded or modified to increase the humor of the piece. I came across an essay by Andres Lambana describing a meeting with comedian Dana Jay Bien. I was particularly interested in his definition of honesty and truth in joke-telling (3 paragraphs from the bottom).

"All of my jokes are based on a truthful premise" he added. "I might stretch the truth a little bit. I try to still be silly sometimes. I hyperbolize sometimes. Or I make the metaphor larger for the sake of humor. But I always try to base things in some sort of truth" he said. That truth matters a lot for Dana and is the only ingredient that he always adds to his jokes.

The comedian's definition of truth, however, is clearly different from the Creative Nonfiction writer's. The general rules of creative nonfiction, from what I've gathered in Tell it Slant, seem to include a very strict adherence to not only the truth, but the facts - no hyperbole, no stretching... no silliness? Earlier in the article, Lambana states, "Making people laugh is finally the ultimate goal of every comedian". This seems to explain, if not necessitate, the allowance of some silliness into the true facts of the comedian's story. I think deep down, audiences know this, and accept it. It's more enjoyable to watch a comedian and believe that he is telling the whole truth about things that really happened to him than to believe that he's telling scripted jokes that may or may not be "true".

To many, a mix of creative nonfiction and fiction is a scary hybrid, and maybe it is, but it works so well in Comedy...

Chronicling personal history

2007-04-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

In reading about the basics of personal reporting and investigative journalism this week, I began to think about such works that I found particularly admirable. It was strange, but I found myself drawn back to a work that I read many years ago in high school -- The Book of Abraham by Marek Halter. The book is really quite amazing: the author, Halter, traces his lineage all the way back to 70 A.D. to the sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the second Temple. The book actually starts with his ancestors at this point -- fleeing from Jerusalem with little more than a scroll documenting their family history -- and follows generation after generation for 19 centuries, culminating with the author's own escape from the Nazis in Poland. The novel, originally in French, received much acclaim in Europe and is now an international bestseller.

When I was in highschool I did not give much consideration as to whether this work was representative of one type of literary genre or the other; I simply thought of it as a novel. Upon reflection, however, I would argue that it qualifies as a work of creative nonfiction. The author conducted extensive research -- for available family records and general historical information -- on which to base his writing. There are understandably gaps, but Hatler tries to stick to the facts as much as possible and, if I am recalling correctly, even indicates throughout the work when pieces are missing or questionable. Because records of the Jewish peoples prior to the 15th century were lost in the Inquisition, Halter's earlier historical accounts are largely fictional. Therefore, this piece also serves as an interesting example of how one might fuse the often disparate genres of fiction and nonfiction in one work.

For those of you who want to learn a little more about the book, here is the link (sorry I couldn't find a much better one): http://www.tobypress.com/books/abraham.htm.
It's a phenomenal work -- compelling, powerful and well-researched! I definitely recommend it, especially to those who like long, chronicle-types of books.

(By the way, I know that this was supposed to be a 'humorous' post, but I thought it would be best to post something honest and worthwhile now when I felt the inclination to write about it. I'll make up for it another day.)

David Sedaris

2007-04-18T00:56:00.000-07:00

So, I can't remember exactly where/when I have heard of David Sedaris before, but I am pretty sure it was in reference to his piece, "Holidays on Ice". More information on David Sedaris can be found on one of my favorite sites of all time. I have also heard good things about his collection of essays entitled, "Me Talk Pretty One Day", although I have never read it. He definitely seems like an interesting character, one worth exploring more. There are also links from this page to more information of "This American Life".

Happy exploring!

"Planned Parenthood's Plans C, D, E, G, F and G for Iraqi Insurgent Control" by Teddy Wayne in McSweeny's

2007-04-18T00:48:00.000-07:00

Check out this really funny faux-article about Planned Parenthood's hypothetical plans to thwart Iraqi insurgents. The article is not only funny but also gives you that lovely squeamish feeling. Politics are enmeshed with the humor of the article, without the piece ever feeling "political."

From a writing point of view, I really admire the taut wording and solid humor. The essay does something very difficult - take a metaphor that's a stretch by any imagination and making it seem just about right. Thinking about the war in Iraq in terms of contraception = genius. If all political writing were like this, people would pay more attention to politics.

Without further ado - click here

Patrick McManus and Anne Lamott

2007-04-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

I looked up two of the humorists mentioned in our book Tell it Slant. The first is Patrick McManus, whose website brought me to the introduction of his book, The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor. I particularly liked the following passage:

A long time ago, I gave up reading reviews of my books, even though most were favorable and some were glowing. There is always the bad one, written by some insipid idiot who wouldn't know sheer brilliance if he fell on it. Reading reviews, no matter how wonderful, is always a downer. You can read sentence after sentence of the most wonderful praise, but the reviewer, perhaps to indicate his objectivity, feels he must, near the very end of the review, insert at least one negative comment: "Even though this work is one of the three greatest novels ever written, I did feel the author made excessive use of the comma." In response, the enraged author screams, "What! How dare that fool criticize my commas?" One negative comment will burn holes in the author's psyche for years afterwards. Take my word, it's best not to read reviews.

I also became fascinated by Anne Lamott, a Bay Area writer and politically liberal born-again Christian. Here's an interesting interview with Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly. Her Word by Word column for the online Salon magazine was voted The Best of the Web by Time magazine. She no longer writes the column, but some of her posts are quite humorous. Because I'm from Massachusetts I clicked on "Teddy and Me" and also read "Diamond Heart," about her relationship with her teenage son.

2007-04-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

I have trouble finding stuff to post on this blog that I'm actually familiar with and have known for more than the ten minutes before I post, when I google creative nonfiction and see what looks like it can be grasped in...ten minutes. Not that I'm lazy, it's just that pretty much all the humorous CNF I’ve read was in books, not online, because I haven’t owned a non-virus-plagued computer since, well, ever, and I lack the attention span to read more than a few paragraphs without checking email and/or facebook. Books are less conducive to this sort of ADD, so I do my share of CNF reading between covers. So, here is my link:

http://haas.stanford.edu/index.php/item/650

This is a campus map. You may use it to navigate yourself to the library, where you can check out a book called The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson is super famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which every college kid piqued by fun-looking drugs has read and worshipped, but I think that his early work is better, and much more instructive, for young writers like us to read. Before he was made a spokesperson for counter- and drug culture, Thompson was a young journalist turning out crisp prose in pieces that are just as shocking and hilarious as his later stuff, but in a muted, and often darker, way. This volume is a collection of his early journalism, including everything he wrote for Rolling Stone.

I see you’re still sitting there in your chair. Did you not see the map? Oh, you did? And you’re not going to go to the library? Damn.

Okay, I figured; the book is the size of a cinderblock and I doubt any of you are really going to run out and read it, but there are two articles which are really worth your time, if you’re serious about CNF: the title’s namesake, “The Great Shark Hunt” (which I can’t find online because any search of that name just turns up places to buy the book), and “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved,” which is online here: http://www.derbypost.com/hunter.html. Enjoy.

Reviewing nonfiction creatively

2007-04-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

I read this book review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat about a month ago and thought it was incredibly well-written and humorous, especially if you are familiar with Friedman's writing. We haven't really talked about reviews as creative nonfiction, and there is obviously a debate over whether someone's opinion can constitute nonfiction per se, but the author, Matt Taibbi, uses direct textual evidence from the book to make his case and makes his argument about the book's merits based on the facts as they are presented by Friedman. And since the book being reviewed is a nonfiction, the veracity of its "facts" and Friedman's own exaggerations are a legitimate point of contention.

How To Travel With a Salmon

2007-04-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

If you have a chance to read Umberto Eco's essay "How to Travel With a Salmon" you should. Now this is a bit roundabout but the essay is short so you can actually read the full text by looking at the "excerpt" feature for the book How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays at amazon.com. I'm working on the link. The collection is all nonfiction essays, although I'm going to make an educated guess and say that the details of "true" events are not really Eco's focus. I love that this piece is funny but it doesn't seem to be about being funny. He's commenting on people, on modernization. It's humor is to invite you to share the joke, if you wish, not to prove that he can make one.

Dave Barry

2007-04-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

I don't think we can let a discussion of humor go by without a nod to Dave Barry. Though he's not writing any new columns, he's well worth reading. Barry takes the ordinary and makes it ridiculous by treating such American institutions as the grade school science project and, well, Florida.

Humor in the Headlines

2007-04-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

We've talked a little, and had some posts, about literary journalism – creative nonfiction, right in our daily papers. The same seems to go for humor pieces. A friend of mine at Columbia emailed me this article a few weeks ago. Opening it, I was surprised (and actually a bit concerned) that she was sending me a page from the Home & Garden section. But I started reading. The article is warm and adorable – and laugh out loud funny in its self-deprecation. By laughing at himself, the author allows us to laugh too, and still root for him, hoping with him that the Greg Years last forever.

Of course, sometimes the news itself is funny.

The Legend of Leeroy Jenkins

2007-04-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

In the online game "World of Warcraft," Leeroy Jenkins is somewhat of a celebrity, thanks to a video clip in which his reckless disregard for the team's plan resulted in his entire team being slaughtered. For anyone who has played any kind of collaborative video game, this video is hilarious.

The story of Leeroy Jenkins was so compelling that it attracted the attention of Joel Warner, who ventured into the game to explore the nature of Leeroy's celebrity status in-game and out. Warner's "The Legend of Leeroy Jenkins" tells the story of Leeroy Jenkins through interviews with people inside the game world and through real life interviews with Leeroy's player, Ben Schulz.

I picked this article because not only do I find Leeroy's story (and video) particularly entertaining, but (as the article mentions) there has been much debate about whether the video itself is original footage, a reenactment, or entirely scripted. In drawing the line between fiction/nonfiction, this seems particularly interesting.

A Little Strange...

2007-04-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

This time I took a page from McSweeney's in order to find something interesting. This article's premise, based on one question, might actually horrify as well as amuse (perhaps more one than the other?). In any case, Celebrities and the Baby Question is an interesting bit.

Because, really, who among us has not seen the occasional celebrity interview? And how different are they really? Our same televised, shared experience become fodder for Michael Ian Black. Using the data he's acquired through the media, he makes a dark statement. It's not exactly a personal essay the likes of which Montaigne wrote, but it's kind of telling in its own way.

Klosterman

2007-04-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

Because this weeks post is meant to be a bit more lighthearted I wanted to post about Chuck Klosterman, an author who I really enjoy reading. He has become pretty famous recently for his novel Killing Yourself to Live which concerns rock and roll's obsession with death. Most of his writing is composed of pop-culture musings. It isn't necessarily earth-shattering stuff but it is certainly entertaining and often very relevant becuase it is written about the time we live in and is published fairly quickly while events are still fresh in the public's mind. I have included a link here to a page of articles written by Klosterman for spin magazine. These are retrospective articles about certain times in music. I hope you all enjoy them. He has stuff all over the web because he writes for so many online publications. If you enjoy this stuff you may want to check out his musings on sports at espn.com.

Trash Compactor Debate

2007-04-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

Here's Josh Tyree's Death Star Trash Compactor Essay in McSweeney's, and... at least one counter-argument from Geekend.

Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter"

2007-04-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

Jo Ann Beard's essay was mentioned in "The Personal Essay" chapter of Tell It Slant.

Her essay, The Fourth State of Matter, tells the story of a shooting at the University of Iowa. It's a great piece. Check it out.

Humor and Dialogue

2007-04-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

To mark the passing of Kurt Vonnegut this week, the Atlantic (a monthly, general interest magazine that publishes journalism, fiction, and poetry) has put up on its website an early piece of his. To quote the link on the front page: "In 1955, Vonnegut, then a General Electric employee and an aspiring novelist, recalled an episode from his Army days." It's a short and funny work of creative nonfiction.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly for a piece about being an incompetent interpreter, he plays a great deal with dialogue and dialect. Personally, my favorite bit is the part where he writes a scene that he is imagining in his head as if it were a play, complete with stage directions. It's a wonderful use of a stylistic convention in literature (we know what a play script would look like) to make his fantasy conversation both more understandable and more humorous and, I think, keep it faithful to the way we imagine life in our heads.

Exaggerating Nonfiction for Humor?

2007-04-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

I came across this article on the response of the media to a criticism of David Sedaris recently published in the New Republic. The piece in TNR chided Sedaris for including imagined scenes and dialogue in his nonfiction works, to which many journalists responded with resounding defenses of Sedaris's work, insisting that the work of great humorists like Mark Twain and Bill Cosby is dependent on some level of exaggeration. Again, the article raises questions of how much "exaggeration" or creative license is acceptable in a work that is classified as "nonfiction" and how much the line between fiction and non- can be blurred. It's also interesting to consider the debate specifically in the form of humor - do humorists have to be less scrupulous about the truth than other "nonfiction" writers? What is at stake in humorous writing, and does it depend as heavily on the truth as a more serious piece might? Why are people so up in arms about James Frey's "exaggeration" of the trugh but defending Sedaris's? Check out the comments on the article, too - they're equally interesting, and one of them even talks specifically about creative nonfiction.

Robert's Picture

2007-04-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

Look at this guy. He is out of control.

Reading Events

2007-04-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

Two of the best links for finding Reading Events on campus are below. You can attend any type of writing-related events that you choose. Four of them by the end of the quarter.

http://events.stanford.edu/
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/cw/events.html

Yo, JMThttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2007-04-09T22:11:00.000-07:00

Hey class, my name is Chellis Ying. I am a writer friend of Tom’s. I was told that Josh M. Tyree (aka. JMT), another guest blogger, had posted a message before me, therefore I was “already behind.” I don’t respond to guilty peer pressuring (ahem, Tom), but after reading up on this blog, I had a few musing and questions about the craft.

I am often told, since I am a younger writer (youngish) that my stories will get better when I have more distance from an incident. Sounds like an insult to me, yet it also makes me wonder: how long do you wait until you write about something? And when you write about something that had happened many years ago, do you in fact have more room for reflection?

I also wanted to share with you one of my favorite personal essays, which happened to be plagiarized and copied online. It’s Laura Hillenbrand’s “A Sudden Illness” originally published in the New Yorker in 2003:

www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html

The Line Between Autobiography and CNFhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2007-04-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

I am curious as to where the line is between an autobiography and Creative Nonfiction. In a sense, isn't all writing an autobiography of sorts? Even fictional writing betrays certain characteristics about the writer in that the writer's biases and personal experiences will shape what he/she writes. I suppose autobiographies focus more on a succession of events, whereas Creative Nonfiction can focus on just one event, or event a slice of an event.

I am interested in this topic because I am currently reading Barack Obama's autobiography, entitled "Dreams from My Father". Overall I think the piece is very well written, but there are certain points were Barack obviously created some dialogue because there is no way that he could remember the exact content of those conversations. If you are interested, you can read more about his autobiography here.

On a slightly related note, I find the whole James Frey scandal fascinating because in a sense I agree with the opinion that people were overreacting. Everyone embellishes to some extent or the other and I am not sure the harsh criticism was warrented.

I think that is all for now. Sorry to post this so late!

Tell It Slant

2007-04-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

Though I would share with all of you that I discovered that the craft book (Tell It Slant) is available in it's entirety online through the Stanford library (with an SU ID of course):

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/stanford/Doc?id=10083657

Why Creative non-fiction... for me!

2007-04-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd share with the class the book that initially drew me to creative non-fiction in the first place. David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" contains an interesting collection of essays ranging from "The Academy Awards" of the porn industry in Las Vegas to a lobster eating festival in Maine. Unlike some other essayists whose writings usually contain a salient narrative arc, Wallace's essays are more like thoughtful explorations that satisfy his peculiar set of curiosities about the seemingly trivial. The insight into his thinking is what makes his essays a fascinating (and hilarious) read.

Here's an interesting (and short) review that remarks on his voice and writing style:
http://www.sfstation.com/consider-the-lobster-and-other-essays-by-david-foster-wallace-a1655

Here's a short excerpt from his essay on "The Academy Awards" of the porn industry in Vegas:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?z=y&ean=9780316156110&displayonly=CHP

New Creative NonFiction Book

2007-04-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

I came across a review yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle of a new autobiographical work entitled The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes. She's a novelist (not one I happen to have read) who has written a book that expands on a personal essay she wrote for the New Yorker magazine a couple of years ago. Homes was adopted as an infant and as adult she seeks out her parents - who turn out to be a woman who at, 22, became pregnant with the child of the older, married boss she had been having a 7 year affair with.

The quotations used in the review give us some sense of the language and I thought this one was particularly relevant to the discussion of creative nonfiction that we're beginning:

" Homes captures the shock of meeting these intimate strangers for the first time. She describes the seismic jolt to her life in a novelist's terms: 'The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of the story, the plot of my life, has been abruptly recast.' She adds, 'There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am.' "

The metaphor of a narrative or story seems particularly apt given that the author is novelist (as the reviewer notes), but I think it's interesting to reflect on whether and how all of us think of our own lives as narratives. Personally, I've known that feeling of having the "the plot of life" recast and the feeling is made tangible by the sense that I can no longer tell a coherent story about my life. The pieces no longer fit neatly. Then, somewhere down the line, I reconstruct the narrative, the moment of disjuncture recast as a turning point, and I no longer feel the "deep fracture."

My point, I guess, is that as I start to think about creative nonfiction, I begin by thinking about the stories we tell about our lives and our identities, then trying to sort out how much of those are truth and how much of those are what we have put back together to fit the narrative of our lives we're drawing.

A Piece by Sarah Bunting

2007-04-09T00:32:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

I've been a long-time fan of Sarah Bunting. She is (if nothing else), incendiary. I don't want to give too much away about the essay, because I don't want to bias anyone's experience. Basically, it is an essay about the socio-political label of "feminist." Who is a feminist? Why has it become such a difficult and loaded term?

Let me know what you think: http://tomatonation.com/?p=677

2007-04-08T23:56:00.000-07:00

On a fairly light note...In class a number of people mentioned an interest in food writing so I thought I would share a link to a web journal written by a friend of mine. She is a senior English major at Princeton where she was lucky enough to take a creative non-fiction course from John McPhee. Her opinion on linking food and sex in writing...

You gotta draw lines, man. Sure food is sexy. Eating mandarin oranges in bed, or biting into a really ripe peach, or (and this could be just me) feeding someone raw tuna, it's sensual, tactile, and fun. But if I want to turn my boyfriend on to the pleasures of beets, it's not because beets are round and pretty and deeply colored and therefore female. Nor is it because they are root vegetables, thick-skinned and bulbous and therefore inherently masculine. You see where I'm going with this? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a really good meal is just a really good meal. Nothing else.

more

2007-04-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

How much can be data and how much can be stretched?

This Lee Gutkind guy talks about life experience being as important to good writing as technical mastery: "To be a better writer, you have to be a better and more well-rounded person. I realized the importance of learning to relate to others and understanding the struggles and challenges of people from different walks of life."
As I see it, the better you are at this sort of thing, the less stretching will be necessary.
The Chronicle article below mentions Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Another piece of Orwell’s that I liked, one that has been classified as nonfiction, is his essay Marrakech (which you can find here: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/marrakech.htm ). As in his reportage of working in the bowels of a Hotel restaurant and living unglamorously among London’s poor in D&O, Orwell has already covered his bases in this essay, as far as reader interest, by transporting himself into an interesting environment and enabling himself to empathize with its inhabitants. He doesn’t have to stretch anything, because he’s in a place where the everyday reality of a typical English or French reader already is stretched. There’s no need for a poetic or analytical attitude; as long as the writer is a proficient craftsman, he need only report, and the facts pull their own weight. Whether or not embellishment is the CNF author's right is irrelevant. If it is, it's one he should never have to invoke.
I think getting yourself in front of things others haven’t seen, transporting yourself to interesting places (though not necessarily exotic ones – when Orwell probed life below the poverty line in London, he was hardly a few blocks away from affluent friends and family members who’d lived there all their lives) and empathizing with new sets of people is half the battle with creative nonfiction, as Gutkind says. Schlosser is another example. His proficiency as a writer is part of it, but it’s more that he managed to get himself inside a slaughterhouse, a place, as he called it "that’s been deliberately hidden." From there he only has to describe what he sees to make interesting writing. You notice one of his paragraphs starts with the smple line, "I see:"
If you are in a place which is truly shocking, exotic, or grotesque, and its people truly interesting, then factuality will be your friend.

Tim O'Brien

2007-04-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

I was really excited to read the earlier post that contained a quote from Tim O'Brien. I read The Things They Carried in high school, and certain passages from it have stuck with me ever since. The book is about the narrator's experiences in Vietnam, but in many ways it's really a meta-discussion of what constitutes truth and fiction. The narrator is named Tim O'Brien, which initially leads many readers to assume that the work is strictly autobiographical, when in fact (as the earlier post shows) it's a melding of several stories, both factual and fictionalized. But it's interesting to think about the relationship between names and the perception of truth - how changing the names of places and people can lead us to classify an otherwise truthful story as a novel, whereas putting real names into a fictionalized account makes us automatic believers.

This one chapter from The Things They Carried really struck me when I first read it, and I've found myself thinking about it a lot since our first class meeting. It really delves into the concepts of "truth" and "reality" that we've been discussing so far on this blog, and also gets into some of the ideas that Cassidy put out there about why the truth (or lack thereof) matters in what we read and write. And it's a great example of creative writing to boot.

"A Parent's Worst Nightmare" by Elizabeth Fernandez

2007-04-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Here is an article that I came across a few months ago in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's a nice example of how fictional characteristics can add to a simple news article. It shows us that creative nonfiction is present in many places that we might not have noticed before (I think my favorite discovery has been Esquire Magazine, :-).

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/11/MNGDEO2QOI1.DTL

Why nonfiction?

2007-04-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm curious why we're drawn to Creative Nonfiction in the first place.

If I'm to believe Annie Dillard, novels are much harder to publish than cnf. But why? Why do buyers and publishers prefer nonfiction narrative? Why would we rather hear about a person’s true life story (even if knowing their history doesn’t in the slightest way impact the practical details of our own lives) than a made up tale about a made up person? Or a made up tale about a real person - what does it matter if George Washington really didn't chop down the cherry tree? Why do we feel cheated if (As in the case of James Frey) weve learned that a work of nonfiction is not, entirely, nonfictional?

Is it because we, as readers, trust a work of fiction less than a work of non-fiction? Do we hold a work of non-fiction like "Three Spheres" to less rigorous standards regarding writing quality and entertainment level because we trust it more? I'm pretty sure we do, but why does this trust matter so much? In actuality, an author in complete control of his plot and details should be able to create a “better,” more interesting story than one who must submit his art to the pressures of “truth” and “fact”... shouldn't he?

Many authors of fiction (Chekhov, I believe, is one) maintain that the plot is only a vehicle used to convey their real message (usually a non-specific, philosophical one). The plot is “the events that drive the story,” implying that the story is a separate, though closely related, entity from the actual events. Does cnf do the same thing, except for that instead of coming from bits and pieces of reality rearranged in the author’s mind, it arises from the original arrangement nature gave it? A writer of cnf can (must?) imply a story or an emotion simply by choosing the correct details. If so, what’s the difference between creative fiction and non, and what does it matter if the author of fiction, or supposed author of “creative nonfiction” re-arranges the details a bit, a la Fray?

The Fine Line

2007-04-08T21:11:00.001-07:00

This SF Gate article Nonfiction concerns itself with artistic liberties in writing. It talks about David Sedaris' use of poetic license in order to complete one of his works ("Naked").

I think it's important to note that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. The same narrative tools are used to fashion either, but they differ in the synthesis and acquisition of material. It is by firsthand experience alone that nonfiction works gain their premise, but exactly how much must be data and how much can be creatively stretched is a dilemma.

How much can be fictionalized?

2007-04-08T21:11:00.000-07:00

This post was prompted by the earlier post about ethics in creative nonfiction. I began to wonder how important the veracity of the content of a story is to its classification as creative nonfiction. Below is a quotation from Tim O'Brien. He has been the author of works of fiction and nonfiction. This quotation refers to a book that was marketed as nonfiction.

"I couldn't care less that the book was nonfiction. It is presented in this way, but any person with an I.Q. over 84 knows that any narrative has to be-at least in part-invented. That is, who's going to remember every scrap of dialogue? Most of that speech has to be made up. And events get reordered in the course of writing, recounting. Also, reality did not come at me the way it comes at you in the book: in the war, back at home when still a little boy, then in basic training, back to the war. There's a scrambling of the chronology which isn't totally real to the world as I lived it. Also, parts of the book, although it's technically nonfiction, are utterly invented, in the same sorts of ways as in The Things They Carried. Not a lot of it, but now and then in the course of writing I took a scrap of event and put it together with another scrap, or I took something from an account, when I wasn't personally present to witness it, or sometimes I would take a conflicting account and choose it over my own, blending everything together to make what seems to be a convincing and coherent story about things I hadn't born witness to in their entirety. By and large the book is a representation of the kinds of reality I lived through, but the picture is also changed by the dialogue, the storytelling technique, things I wasn't aware of at the time. I did this intuitively, sort of saying "I think basically that this is true," but knowing, at the time, I had to do things that weren't strictly nonfiction to make the account possible."

the whole interview may be found here: http://www.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/obrien.htm

I just thought it was interesting to think about the blurring of the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Perhaps it is just as important to convey a feeling as it actually occured as to convey events as they actually occured. I really enjoy O'Briens writing, he makes some comments about truth and narrative in his work of fiction The things They Carried. These comments refelct the sentiment that truth may come from emotion more than events.

Lauren Slater

2007-04-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

Related to the earlier post on Lauren Slater, I wrote about her piece, "Dr. Daedalus: A Radical Plastic Surgeon Wants to Give You Wings," for PWR last year. Harper's Magazine's July 2001 cover story, Slater's article follows plastic surgeon Joe Rosen's quest to alter the human form, interspersed with Slater's personal musings. Her writing questions the definition of humanity and the role of radical ideas in today's world.

Click here for the EBSCO link to Harper's magazine, then choose July 2001. "Dr. Daedalus" is Article #4 on the list. (Note: I had originally posted the full link, but for some reason this seems like the best I can do now.)

While further Googling Lauren Slater this afternoon, I read some reviews of her book, Prozac Diary, and her personal background sounds quite interesting... Click here for the link on Amazon.

Creative Nonfiction, the journal

2007-04-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Creative Nonfiction is a journal founded by Lee Gutkind, "devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction." Here is the site's definition of CNF:

WHAT IS CREATIVE NONFICTION?
Dramatic, true stories using scenes, dialogue, close, detailed descriptions and other techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers about important subjects - from politics, to economics, to sports, to the arts and sciences, to racial relations, and family relations.

Creative Nonfiction heightens the whole concept and idea of essay writing. It allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist.

We want the essays we publish in Creative Nonfiction to have purpose and meaning beyond the experiences related by the writers. Good essays embrace a larger audience. They strike a universal chord.

How, I wonder, does this "universal chord" relate to the difference between truth and falsehood?

Here are some audio excerpts from an interview with Gutkind--his answers to the questions "What is the essence of creative nonfiction?" and "Can creative nonfiction be too creative?" have him fighting for space between traditional nonfiction and fiction.

Sections from back issues are available online, including a short article about Laura Slater's "Three Spheres" that reflects on the development of the essay from personal experience to what she terms "the white light of the page."

Ethics in Creative Nonfiction

2007-04-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

This is a link to "Truer Words: Writers tackle the ethics of nonfiction", an article featuring discussion among writers about the creative nonfiction genre and the extent to which liberties may be taken in writing pieces of creative nonfiction. The issue of ethics in creative nonfiction is one that has generated significant debate in the last year, particularly in light of the James Frey "scandal" (click here to read The Smoking Gun's article that reveals much of Frey's harrowing account in A Million Little Pieces as unfactual).

But how heavily are we bound to the facts when we write creative nonfiction? After all, it should be creative, so what is the proper balance between fiction and fact?

Below is an excerpt from the article that mentions Lee Gutkind's reaction to the Frey incident:

Gutkind says Frey violated the two golden rules of creative nonfiction: Don't make stuff up, and if you're going to take imaginative liberties, such as indulging in speculation, tell readers what you're doing. "[Frey] let the story carry him away from the facts," he says.

Yet Gutkind sympathizes with Frey, and not just because it was Frey's success that got him busted for crimes lesser-known writers have long gotten away with. Gutkind contends that the truth of an event -- not to mention the memory of it -- can itself be subjective. "It's a very blurry, foggy line" between what's allowed and what's prohibited in creative nonfiction, he says.

"Most creative writers understand the flexibility of the form and how difficult it is to pinpoint truth in literature," he writes in A Million Little Choices, a new special issue of Creative Nonfiction. "[T]here are higher truths ... that may not be easily fact-checked."

Moneyball

2007-04-08T01:39:00.000-07:00

Moneyball is a creative non-fiction book written by Michael Lewis that analyzes the beginning of the use of statistics in major league baseball. The book tracks the change from when scouts ruled with gut decisions to when college graduates entered the scene, basing decisions off of numbers and calculations.

An interview with Michael Lewis is posted here.

Here is the beginning of the book:

"The first thing they always did was run you. When the big league scouts road-tested a group of elite amateur prospects, foot speed was the first item they checked off their lists. The scouts actually carried around checklists. “Tools” is what they called the talents they were checking for in a kid. There were five tools: the abilities to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power. A guy who could run had “wheels”; a guy with a strong arm had “a hose.” Scouts spoke the language of auto mechanics. You could be forgiven, if you listened to them, for thinking they were discussing sports cars and not young men."

Revisiting, in Narrative

2007-04-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

Search for Lauren Slater on Google and, after her official website and an essay excerpt, you will find a scathing, two-part indictment of the author, her work, and, indeed, much of the concept of creative nonfiction. The blogosphere home of this critique, Respectful of Otters, is written by an urban psychologist in AIDS/HIV research. Her posts on Slater (found here and here) focus on two essays which appeared in Slater's 2004 book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century and take issue with what she sees as the lack of veracity – and straight reporting – in Slater's prose.

"Into the Cuckoo's Nest" is one of the two articles profiled. It chronicles Slater's attempt to recreate a 1972 experiment by David L. Rosenhan, a professor emeritus at the Stanford School of Law. Rosenhan sent eight accomplices (and himself) to various psych hospitals around the country, each claiming to be hearing voices. The "patients" were admitted and immediately dropped the act. The crux of Rosenhan's case was that even though all eight pseudo-patients were acting normally, they were held, analyzed, diagnosed, and treated as though they were crazy. Everyday behavior became pathological. After the experiment, Rosenhan published his findings in Science magazine – the article can be seen here.

Rosenhan's article is not creative nonfiction, reading somewhere closer to a lab report. Slater's recreation, published originally in The Guardian, and found here, is. Slater sees herself as continuing the course set by Rosenhan. Rivka of Respectful of Otters sees her as a menace, distorting the truth.

Narrative Magazine

2007-04-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Narrative magazine is a newish online venture associated with StoryQuarterly. It features some creative nonfiction by great writers, and it is available via a free online subscription. Once you subscribe, all the material is available in full in pdf formats. Here is a sample from Robert Stone's "Riding the Dawg," which starts off on campus and is really good memoir-based cnf:

Early on a fall morning in 1963 I went to the Stanford clinic with what I thought was an errant eyelash. A thin crooked line was segmenting my field of vision, making it impossible to read or write anything. Before the day was out, an unwholesome interior light was burning semaphores into the underside of my eyelids.

The whole essay is available at this web address once you are logged into the Narrative site as a subscriber:
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/content/html/214/toc
And here is the web address of Narrative site for subscribing:
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/
The free subscription also gets you access to StoryQuarterly.

Lee Gutkind's Site

2007-04-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Lee Gutkind is the editor of our In Fact anthology. He's got an interesting website, especially his short essay about himself titled "The Creative Nonfiction Way of Life." This is a worthwhile read. The beginning:

Deciding to dedicate myself to writing creative nonfiction and delaying a dream of writing fiction was a conscious and carefully considered decision.

At the time I was in my middle 20s, and I realized that I didn't know enough about the world to write anything with the insight and experience necessary to make my novels and short stories culturally and morally significant. To be a better writer, you have to be a better and more well-rounded person. I realized the importance of learning to relate to others and understanding the struggles and challenges of people from different walks of life. If characters I created in my fiction were to be compelling and true then, I concluded, I had to learn about other lifestyles, other professions, and the patchwork of prejudices and kindness that make some people different from others.

There is also an interview with him on Bookslut.

Class Schedule

2007-04-03T19:56:00.001-07:00

Early Schedule:

Wed, April 4th – First Day of class, writing exercise, introductions
Mon, April 9th – Notes for Young Writers, Three Spheres, Basics of Good Writing
Wed, April 11th – Looking at Emmett Till, Particular Challenges
Mon, April 16th – Finders Keepers, The Personal Essay
Wed, April 18th – Celestial Navigation, Basics of Personal Reportage
Mon, April 23rd – In the Woods, Unearthing Your Material Part I
Wed, April 25th – Why I Ride, Unearthing Your Material Part II

Note: Longer Essays are due on Monday, May 7th.

Class Syllabus

2007-04-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

Creative Nonfiction
Stanford University, Spring 2007
MW 3:15-5:05, Room: 200-124
Tom Kealey

Class Website: http://cnf.stanford.googlepages.com/

Creative nonfiction is a well-debated writing form that is mainly journalistic in nature, but that also makes use of fiction-writing tools such as internal narration, dialogue, and compression of time and characters. Although even that loose definition would be debated by some writers and scholars. In any case, I’m less interested in spending our ten weeks debating what creative nonfiction is, and I’m more interested in practicing it. We’ll learn by doing. That said, let’s keep in mind how how a work of Creative Nonfiction is shaped (source: Philip Lopate and Peter Bricklebank):

1. The Personal Presence of the Author.
2. An Engagement Between Self and the World.
3. The Author’s Self-exploration and Self-discovery.
4. The Need to Both Show and Tell.
5. Veracity and Authenticity.
6. The Mutability of Form.
7. The Sense of Intellectual Plot, Quest, Engagement, or Payoff.

And of course, creative nonfiction can take the shape of essays in travel, science, sports, memoir, and a variety of other subjects.

One thing I’d like to make clear: my experiences in writing lay mainly on the fictional side, with the writing of novels and short stories. In the last years I’ve delved into creative nonfiction through my work with 826 Valencia in San Francisco. So, this course, for each of us, is an introduction to the form and craft. I’ll be writing and learning along with you. So, let’s make a pact: We’re going to take some risks in this course, we’re going to write some great work, do some interesting research and experiencing, and sometimes we’re going to fall on our faces. That’s a good thing to my mind. When we do, we’ll pick each other up and trudge forward.

Texts:
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (anthology)
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (craft book)
The New New Journalism (interviews)

Requirements (each counting 20%):

Postings to the Class Blog: Each week, we’ll link to interesting articles of and about creative nonfiction. I’d like you to post at least once a week and read other students posts as well. The blog is available through Blogger (you’ll have to register to use this), and it can be found at http://cnfstanford.blogspot.com. And, feel free to post both serious and humorous work. We can have a little fun as we move through this.

Your Website and Short Writings. You’ll create your own website for your short writings. You can do this through Blogger or Google Pages, and the only requirements are that your site is public, well-organized, and has a space for comments from readers. This site will act as your portfolio. We’ll post four to five short essays (one to three pages).

Class Participation. I’ll certainly do some lecturing, but for the most part we’ll talk about our readings in our craft, anthology, and interview books. Speak up, help out, and share your ideas, questions, and insights. This grade will also include your one-page response letters to the longer work of other students, as well as your comments online to their short writings.

Longer Essay. Ten to fifteen pages, double-spaced. This can be about any subject of your choosing. In the second half of the class, we’ll workshop these essays in class, and you’ll make fifteen copies in preparation. We may also use Conventi.com to do some preliminary feedback.

Reading Attendance. You’ll attend four readings at Stanford this quarter. The subject and speaker can be of your choosing, and we’ll announce these each class.

~

Late Assignments: Anything turned in late will receive a grade of C.

Finally: I’ll be working hard to make this class an enjoyable and valuable learning experience for you. If it’s within my power, this will be your favorite class this quarter

First Posting

2007-03-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

The idea behind the CNF Blog is for both instructor and students to have access. Here we'll post links, responses to readings, plus creative work. "Comments" will be enabled in order to offer feedback on assignments. The site will be open to the public.

The Landing Page for the class is available at cnf.stanford.googlepages.com