Memoirous

OCWW is happy to announce the following upcoming event: Jane Hertenstein - The Memoir/Fiction Hybrid: Writing that Doesn’t Fit a Category- Remote Session Remote Date: April 30, 2020 9:30 AM CDT Remote Session Often our work crosses boundaries, blurs the lines. Today many writers are publishing hybrids. Examples of metafiction and autofiction that blur the lines are  T he Friend  by Sigrid Nunez, winner of the National Book Award for fiction, and  History of Violence  by Edouard Louis.   Jane Hertenstein will talk about what constitutes a hybrid, the freedom to color outside the lines, and also some practical and ethical questions that pop up when considering how to evaluate and place work that blends memoir and fiction. Come prepared to explore all the many directions your writing may take yo u. Jane Hertenstein  is   a repeat instructor at OCWW having presented on topics such as memoir and flash. She is   the author of over 80 publis...

OCWW is happy to announce the following upcoming event: Jane Hertenstein - The Memoir/Fiction Hybrid: Writing that Doesn’t Fit a Category- Remote Session Remote Date: April 30, 2020 9:30 AM CDT Remote Session Often our work crosses boundaries, blurs the lines. Today many writers are publishing hybrids. Examples of metafiction and autofiction that blur the lines are  T he Friend  by Sigrid Nunez, winner of the National Book Award for fiction, and  History of Violence  by Edouard Louis.   Jane Hertenstein will talk about what constitutes a hybrid, the freedom to color outside the lines, and also some practical and ethical questions that pop up when considering how to evaluate and place work that blends memoir and fiction. Come prepared to explore all the many directions your writing may take yo u. Jane Hertenstein  is   a repeat instructor at OCWW having presented on topics such as memoir and flash. She is   the author of over 80 published...

OCWW is happy to announce the following upcoming event: Jane Hertenstein - The Memoir/Fiction Hybrid: Writing that Doesn’t Fit a Category- Remote Session Remote Date: April 30, 2020 9:30 AM CDT Remote Session Often our work crosses boundaries, blurs the lines. Today many writers are publishing hybrids. Examples of metafiction and autofiction that blur the lines are  T he Friend  by Sigrid Nunez, winner of the National Book Award for fiction, and  History of Violence  by Edouard Louis.   Jane Hertenstein will talk about what constitutes a hybrid, the freedom to color outside the lines, and also some practical and ethical questions that pop up when considering how to evaluate and place work that blends memoir and fiction. Come prepared to explore all the many directions your writing may take yo u. Jane Hertenstein  is   a repeat instructor at OCWW having presented on topics such as memoir and flash. She is   the author of over 80 published...

I’ve been reading many authors and books getting ready for the Festival of Faith & Writing. FFW. I’m also part of a professional group called OCWW, Off Campus Writers Workshop run out of the Winnetka Community House. Established in 1946, OCWW is the oldest continuously running writing workshop in the country. I’ve presented there a couple of times and the membership is extremely generous and active. They come out! And, they are not mere, hobbyists, they are submitting work and take their craqft seriously. Finally, I am the Chicago city co-rep for SCBWI, Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. This past weekend I helped with our network house party where about a dozen of us got together to snack, drink, and talk about what we’re doing. I was impressed with the various kinds of writing all under the heading of for children. Members are working on podcasts, teleplays, poetry, novels and stories. We’re mostly working across genres and platforms to reach our audience. It...

I need to start this entry with an admission: I have not read a single Ann Patchett book. I have heard her name come up in literary circles for over a decade and it is “on my list.” FredShafer uses her material in his workshops at  OCWW , but I just haven’t gotten around to reading Bel Canto, The Commonwealth, and—now, The Dutch House. I moonlight At Wilson Abbey an event space and especially show up for book events put on by The Book Cellar and Women and Children First, as well as book launches held there. As much as I’ve decried buying more books, I am packing out my shelves more than ever. Back to Ann Patchett who had a Chicago appearance to support The Dutch House at Wilson Abbey last week. I wanted to hear this woman that everyone talks about so glowingly. There were 350 people in the auditorium. I stood in the back. When she came on at exactly 7 pm she apologized for being late??? Then told us that she’d missed an earlier flight and had to take the next one out o...

This story, Big Thompson, was something I had on my mind for awhile--in a couple different pieces. Listening to Rebecca Makkai at OCWW talk about how she composed a few of the stories in her collection Music for Wartime I went home and tried to do the same thing. She wrote down two of her strongest ideas and then tried to tie them together into one plot. For example, the collection ends with “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” a story that focuses on an apartment house that had a gas leak which killed almost all of its inhabitants, save one couple—who also survived the Holocaust. Relatives move into the apartments, and one of the new residents is an artist who is creating a project—a dollhouse structure using found and donated objects from each apartment. Record albums serve as a focal point for each miniature room: Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, Joe Cocker. Whew! This could all seem like such a jumble--but under a deft hand it can all come together. So I combines images of water ...

I recently had an excerpt of my chapbook Bright Invisible in Utterance Journal A short story will be out soon in THINK journal It is titled Big Thompson and I used a method laid out by Rebecca Makkai author of The Great Believer and a finalist for the Pultizer Prize. She was teaching a class a few years ago at OCWW where she said when trying to come up with ideas for a short story she sometimes let her ideas collide--for instance news of a recent gas leak/explosion and Holocaust survivors. She has a penchant for putting together incongruous scenarios and constructing a story. I thought: Why not?  I'd had in mind several loose threads that had to do with water: New Burlington, Ohio that was abandoned and flooded to make way for a reservoir ( Caesar Creek State Park ) and a flood that occurred in Colorado along the Big Thompson in 1976. Adding other tidbits, I wove together a 5,000 word story. Forthcoming--Big Thompson. Finally, Stoneboat a print journal contacted me ...

Florida Lauren Groff Riverhead Books, New York 2018 I am a capricious reader—of Lauren Groff. Her Fates & Furies infuriated me. I read it because it was mentioned in a group review of House Frau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, a good friend of mine. There was at the time a certain “wokeness” of reviewers about women and sex. I know, ridiculous. The idea was that these books should be grouped together because women in them were having sex. Which didn’t make sense because had not one of the reviewers read Madame Bovary ? Maybe they were put together because it was women writing novels about sex. Either way, even the categorization was infuriating. Fates & Furies went on to be highly lauded: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A FINALIST FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NPR MORNING EDITION BOOK CLUB PICK NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS, AND MANY MORE Yo...

Flash Fiction and the Holidays The Yuletide season is a perfect time to write flash memoir. 1)       We have no time to write a gajillion words, so keep it simple and small, haiku Christmas! Remember Dicken’s A Christmas Carol was one of his shortest and MOST popular stories, The best things come in small packages. 2)       So MUCH material is generated by dysfunctional families, Christmas feast disasters, Gift of the Magi moments. We all have memories conjured by this festive/unfestive time of the year. So I have some ideas I’ll share with you this week as we head into Thanksgiving—which launches us into Black Friday and the Advent Season. My first tip is to come to a class I’ll be facilitating at OCWW in Winnetka. Jane Hertenstein - Holiday Flash When December 20, 2018 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM Location Winnetka Community House, 620 Lincoln Ave., Winnetka IL Registration Guest – $20.00 Member – $10.0...

I recently got a chance to hear Stuart Dybek (The Coast of Chicago) talk at OCWW, Off Campus Writers Workshop, the oldest continuing writer’s workshop in the US. The topic of discussion was re-visioning our revisions. I know, not sexy. It was incredible to look at a marked-up copy of “Pet Milk”, The New Yorker, August 13, 1984. Can you imagine the highs and lows. A story accepted by The New Yorker! They need a few clarifications and copy edits, no problem! Only what Dybek gets back in the mail looks like algebra. Oh my God, he thinks—is it this bad. The copy he hands out to us is insightful—the editor asked Dybek to go deeper, re-imagining his story. I’ve written here in a much earlier post about “Pet Milk” and how it is a story launched from a flash memory. Dybek more than substantiated that theory in the class. Of course it was and wasn’t him, more who he wished he were. “The author thinks back to a time when he was sixteen . . . .” We can imagine ourselves on that EL platfo...

Just got my copy of FLASH , the International Short-Short Story Magazine with my essay: The Mystery of Memory--or How to Write Memoir-ish. The journal is out of the University of Chester in the UK. It's great to see a school with a Creative Writing Program with an emphasis on micro fiction and non-fiction. Keep your ear to the ground--as I'm going to be leading a class at OCWW (Off Campus Writers Workshop) in Winnetka March 27th on Writing Your Memoir, Scene by Scene We all have fantasized at one time or another about what famous celebrity will play us in the movie of our life. With this seminar Jane Hertenstein will help you isolate significant life moments and translate them into scenes. Some issues she will explore are working with composite characters, streamlining events, creating creative non-fiction, and finding the arc in your story. Life is made up of a number of episodes. I'll be taking manuscripts. Yay!! Currently (like this past week) been busy...

When it is going to be fall? The weather outside is a miasma of abnormally high temps and sweltering humidity and—excuse me!—it’s October! This is the first autumn in five years that I haven’t been tied up working the Green City Farmer’s Market . A number of circumstances conspired where for one reason or another I ended up not getting hired. A little bittersweet. I loved have weekends off, but have missed the customers and the smells. Especially now as it is apple time. I used to work a stall that was next to the Nordic Cheese guy who once it started getting frosty brought in his wife to crank up a propane fryer in order to fry cheese! Another stall had HOT apple cider. One time, after a dreary morning of very few customers (and the ones that dared come out in the rain were there for business and not pleasure; they ran from stall to stall and then quickly left) so I was sent on an errand to the Zullo’s stand for some hot from the fryer Zeppole. So right now ...

Today I trekked up to Winnetka to OCWW (Off-Campus Writers Workshop) in the cold, misty half-snow half-rain. I know, a lot of dreary weather adjectives. It was a multiple weather adjective day. Christine Sneed was speaking. I’d heard her at a AWP panel in 2012 talk about organizing short story collections. Her talk today was about the short story and so I submitted a manuscript and, surprise, mine was selected for the workshop. It’s something I’ve submitted around, but haven’t had any takers on yet. The class really liked it and there were some key suggestions on improving it! Lately I’ve been feeling invisible. I’m sure this all ties in with my artistic insecurities, but truthfully writing more and more seems like a young person’s world. Christine touched on this. She said she was somewhat of a late bloomer. Or maybe that she’d blossomed and it took a decade for people to notice. Anyway, for women of a certain age, we’re easily looked over. Part of it is: I don’t look v...

I taught a class this morning in Winnetka at the Off-Campus Writers Workshop (OCWW). I like the name of this group because even though it is “off-campus” it means that somewhere there is a university. It might be as close as I’ll get to being an adjunct (which, in some situations, is not saying so much). Anyway—it went well. We talked about where flash comes from and one of the things I mentioned was to-do lists. I create lists for just about everything. I’ve been keeping a list of things that remind me of Mom. My mother died about a year ago. I wasn’t exactly devastated when I got the phone call. She’d been in a state of fragile health for going on two months. My grief was mixed—relief and a sense of closure. Lately, though, I’ve been getting these sudden nudgings, memories provoked by the weirdest things. Here is a partial list: --excess handlotion Mom would routinely squirt too much out and then make me come over, hold open my hands, and then rub the excess lotion on ...

Okay, this is by all accounts crazy, like jet propulsion--or in view of the Christian calendar--the opposite of "ordinary" time, sonic time. I submitted a flash and five minutes later it was accepted and within the hour posted here . The piece was totally spun from my head. I had the idea one EARLY morning (I am a morning cook and am up before EVERYONE) while listening to the radio. I just imagined a woman, I imagined her on her birthday, then I imagined her sorry life and the tenets or cords that hold that fragile life together, the moral of the story. And coupled those thoughts with twilight, or those periods when the sun has not come out all day, like living in a fog or swimming underwater. My thoughts flitted and spun as if turning somersaults--without the heaviness of gravity. This is what I wrote about. Sort of. What came out might not at all have been what I was actually thinking, but the result of eating too much popcorn the night before. Nevertheless--a flash. I ...