by Virginia Lloyd | May 31, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
I have been reading Penelope Trunk’s blog in my Google Reader feed for a while now. (If, like me, you get overwhelmed trying to keep up with a crowd of relevant blogs and websites, I highly recommend the Reader as a time saving technique – take a tour...
by Virginia Lloyd | May 22, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
That we have all survived literary blogger Maud Newton’s 40th birthday – it fell on the same day as the rapture that wasn’t – is no excuse for you not to read her fabulous piece in The Awl about that coincidence. To celebrate our survival, I...
by Virginia Lloyd | May 12, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Julian Barnes’s review of her memoir, A Widow’s Story, in a letter to the editor in the current edition of the New York Review of Books. In “For Sorrow There is No Remedy”, Barnes read carefully and responded...
by Virginia Lloyd | Apr 30, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
This week, publishing expert and Writers Digest blogger Jane Friedman published this list of useful resources for people writing memoir. When I finally got around to clicking through it – this morning – one particular article led to a minor epiphany in the...
by Virginia Lloyd | Mar 28, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
Writing teacher and author Lynette Benton, who writes the much-visited Polish and Publish blog, recently asked me for my thoughts on the differences between memoir and family history. While the question was prompted by a student asking for clarification during one of...
by Virginia Lloyd | Feb 7, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
Over at the impressive online magazine Guernica, Deb Olin Unferth’s “Memoir Manifesto” is an inspiring rejoinder to Neil Genzlinger’s recent assault on memoir (detailed here). Unferth makes a compelling case for the splintering of autobiography...