Faith Shearin is a master of metaphors. Here are some of my favorites from the poems in Moving the Piano: “We let the deer come to us like secrets, their legs made of silence.” (93) “…the water, which has grown colder, like a man’s hand at the end of … Read More
Month: January 2015
“That was my mistake.”
Some memoirs resemble novels — they build a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The challenge for the writer is to make it interesting for readers who already know the ending. In the case of Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, the reader knows from the book’s … Read More
“Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.”
This is the first line of a poem by Billy Collins, who believes the “signature” of a poem is its tone. In an interview with George Plimpton for the Paris Review, Collins said, “The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone … Read More
“It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail.”
This beautiful novel could be a “how to” manual for aspiring writers. It shows how to have a virtuous central character who is interesting — a rare feat in contemporary literature. It shows how to structure a novel without using standard architectural tools, such as chapters. It shows how to … Read More
“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination, as your imagination limits the world.”
This is the third of six volumes of memoir about the world and the imagination of Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s a new kind of writing that defies categorization and is driven be the desire to explore the truth. For Knausgaard, “the truth” includes the things that he is ashamed of … Read More