Personal Essay
-
Why You Should Write Micro-Memoirs
They combine the truthfulness of memoir, the conflict-focused tension of fiction, and the precision of poetry. They are brief, tightly woven nuggets of narrative energy. When Beth Ann Fennelly published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, she added another sub-category to the genre of flash nonfiction. Micro-memoirs capture seemingly insignificant moments in a life and discover… Continue reading
-
How Much Should We Really Think about Audience?
Lately I’ve been writing about food. I’ve been reflecting on the complicated relationship I’ve had over the years with eating. The way I overate during the summer after my father died when I was twelve, downing box after box of Keebler cookies all those hot afternoons, enough to singlehandedly keep those tree-dwelling elves in business.… Continue reading
-
Moment on a Bridge in Western Maryland (An Experiment in Memoir)
A police officer stood in the road ahead signaling for me to stop. I had just left the campus of the community college where I taught and had driven less than half a mile when I saw him standing under the freeway overpass. He seemed to be stopping traffic for no reason. No one else… Continue reading
-
How to Leave Your Problems on the Page
Do our problems define us? Have our past experiences, especially those that were difficult or troubling, made us who we are? Are they an integral part of our identity? In their 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, family therapists Michael White and David Epston observed that people sometimes define themselves in terms of their… Continue reading
-
How to Begin a Personal Essay
No one wrote more provocative first lines of poems than Emily Dickinson. Who could read an opening line such as I felt a Funeral, in my Brain or I heard a Fly buzz—when I died and not feel compelled to read on? When we write introductions for personal essays, our impulse may be to rely… Continue reading
-
Make Yourself a Metaphor
Metaphor is a mystery nestled somewhere near the heart of language. Why do we so often think this way, uniting unlike things with our words—the abstract with the concrete—and feeling satisfaction rather than dissonance as a result? Metaphor allows us to describe what would be otherwise indescribable—the minutiae of our emotions, the pinpricks of our… Continue reading
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
Person on the Page 