Real: take the cocaine and get to Key West. It was a difficult time because he was still calling, and I couldn’t move on. BJ Hollars’s anthology Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction — another fun one to think about the possibilities of the genre. Is prose poetry and flash nonfiction the same thing? (Though we may have discussed our brothers’ addictions — and her empathy, as I recall, floored me.) Abortion has. I definitely had this in mind in the section when Indie and I cross the border into New Mexico: I always feel something shift when I approach a border, and perhaps it’s because that’s where I feel most at home — on some invisible line between two states, the then and the now, the before and the after — and I suspect Indie feels a bit of that, too — between a parent she knows and a parent she doesn’t. When I read your question, I thought of your beautiful memoir, If Only You People Could Follow Directions — also a memoir-in-essays.   Privacy How can you arrange these conversations to see what needs to be discussed (the gap in the conversation)? It reminded me of the way the road also offers up new perspectives, whether on the radio or in the shifting landscape and the necessary silence. I also guest edited a special issue of Sundog Lit last year, the “(Letters from) the Road” issue, in which I attempted to usurp genre with mode and create an essayistic issue. My best friend since junior high (who went with me to visit Kenny in Colorado in 2000 and met his roommate, Dan. Is your experience or understanding of time related to your experience of memory? In, this controversy, some believe men should be able to be free when discussing the topic compared. For example: Why I did I drive to the prison while drinking Chardonnay from a Nalgene bottle, or send sixty bucks a month for commissary, or write a letter to the prison board to get a stranger moved to another prison, or stand in a classroom discussing the blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction while the guy I had woken in the night to find sitting in my bedroom sat in the back of the class. You can apply Freytag’s Triangle to its narrative — the exposition/rising action/climax/resolution we all learned in school. Which formal elements of the road narrative were you working toward or against? This quick outline should get you well on your way to synthesizing. It also allows the writer to explore material in a new way, and for a writer like me who returns to the same material (like a loop), these experiments force me to write that material in a different way. JHN: What are you working on now? I wanted to ask you this question after reading the essay, “Radio Silence,” about halfway through the The Way We Weren’t. JHN: Your book is also a road narrative — one in which the journey is both physical and emotional/intellectual. If you agree, but not quite, what could be done differently? Do we need to devise a better way to label our literature? So ultimately, you are creating a combination of what your sources are conversing about (subject X) and how you have rearranged what is being said to create a new direction for that subject. 1500 word Mapping the Conversation essay DUE 3.26. This thread is archived. Hopefully. What are your latest concerns or obsessions, as they relate to your writing and the work you’re reading? We fill in the missing pieces with what we imagine or just leave the gap, admit the blank.” The memoir is built of these pieces and gaps and blanks that would work against a traditional memoir. Ben Marcus has a great quote along these lines: “Without time, fiction is nonfiction.” What he means, I think, is that fiction constructed in a discursive, associative way, rather than along a chronological line, is essentially essay. You’re driving to Oklahoma City with your daughter, Indie, and accompanied not just by various radio personalities, but others — Kerouac and Sinatra among them — who you’re summoning up in order to lend some insight into single motherhood. What does this form allow that a “straight memoir” does not? The “hermit crab” essays, in particular, like your essay in syllabus form or the essay written as a wine list (aptly titled “Wine List”) point explicitly to the artifice of the form, often making some ironic commentary on the form, and remind us that all art is artifice, as you say, well removed from experience. I did make a point to warn Indie before I signed the contract that there was the possibility that this book could bring her father out of the woodwork and that we should be prepared for that. Some writers like to argue that it doesn’t matter, except when it comes to marketing perhaps, but I think it’s intrinsic to how we read, write, and make sense of our world — as well as instrumental to the ways we publish and sell literature. Instead of what happened, it’s about what’s unknown about what happened. On-Sale July 2015 from soft Skull Press recent discussions is the author ’ s braided... You agree, but not quite, what could be done differently many writers memoir. Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, reveals the significance of words and writing and couldn t. Can not be posted and votes can not be cast tell — I ’ d to. Was radiant in the conversation essay DUE 3.26. comment do “ hermit crab ” essays offer a?. 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