Memoirous

My friend Tammy Perlmutter has a poem in this anthology. Tammy is a persistent blogger and founder of The Mudroom , a blogging alliance. From her blog: In 2009 Zadie Smith wrote a piece called “The Rise of the Essay.”  She writes about the problems of even the highest-regarded classical literary fiction and the arguments that “all plots are ‘conventional’ and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted.”  Instead of mourning the demise of the perfect novel, she poses an important question: “Will the ‘lyrical essay,’ be the answer to the novel’s problems? Is the very idea of plot, character and setting in the novel to be abandoned, no longer fit for our new purposes, and all ground ceded to the coolly superior, aphoristic essay?”   Virginia Woolf herself wrote an essay on essays called “The Modern Essay”  in which she wrote. “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay....