nonfiction – Page 33 – Michigan Quarterly Review

nonfiction

Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration

Leave a Comment /

In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent twenty-first century desire for reality is compromised by the fact that our storytelling mechanisms are growing further from it. As Shields notes (without acknowledging in the text proper that he is parroting E. L. Doctorow), “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

Not Essay, Nor Fiction, But Prose: Of Narration Read More »

In his manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields uses assemblage to curate a dialogue about the limits of The Real. The voices he appropriates and sequences implicitly argue that our increasingly urgent twenty-first century desire for reality is compromised by the fact that our storytelling mechanisms are growing further from it. As Shields notes (without acknowledging in the text proper that he is parroting E. L. Doctorow), “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.”

“The Only Woman in the Room”: An Interview with Eileen Pollack

Leave a Comment /

“When I teach nonfiction, we talk about writing to a question. If you write what you already know, it’s not going to be interesting for your readers. You need to be looking for some kind of a discovery, and so I went to Yale to see what and what hadn’t changed, because my story needed to be contextualized. After hearing from young women that their experiences were just as bad as mine, it floored me. That’s the moment I knew I had a book.”

“The Only Woman in the Room”: An Interview with Eileen Pollack Read More »

“When I teach nonfiction, we talk about writing to a question. If you write what you already know, it’s not going to be interesting for your readers. You need to be looking for some kind of a discovery, and so I went to Yale to see what and what hadn’t changed, because my story needed to be contextualized. After hearing from young women that their experiences were just as bad as mine, it floored me. That’s the moment I knew I had a book.”

On “Home is Burning”: An Interview with Dan Marshall

Leave a Comment /

“I think I was writing the blog to make my friends laugh—the content was definitely frattier, more about the easy jokes—but I tried to make the book more widely accessible. The book-writing process was more about picking the most important moments, wrapping them around a theme, and framing the journey—not to sound like some pretentious little art dickhead. But, it was about giving the story shape. It took a few drafts to get there, but I finally started to realize, ‘Okay, this is really a story about somebody and his siblings going through an intense situation and being forced through it to grow up and take on a little more responsibility.'”

On “Home is Burning”: An Interview with Dan Marshall Read More »

“I think I was writing the blog to make my friends laugh—the content was definitely frattier, more about the easy jokes—but I tried to make the book more widely accessible. The book-writing process was more about picking the most important moments, wrapping them around a theme, and framing the journey—not to sound like some pretentious little art dickhead. But, it was about giving the story shape. It took a few drafts to get there, but I finally started to realize, ‘Okay, this is really a story about somebody and his siblings going through an intense situation and being forced through it to grow up and take on a little more responsibility.'”

On “Pieces of My Mother”: An Interview with Melissa Cistaro

Leave a Comment /

“Geneticists, after all, are studying to see whether there are genes for empathy. I kept asking myself how people are really wired, what traits from our ancestors we carry. This motif is about all the little things we don’t know or aren’t told, or that are kept from us, but that we carry with us—the pieces of us that feel not right, or that are confusing. I’m very much fascinated with the trauma or grief that’s conceivably locked into our bodies—I believe in all that. And in many ways, those women in my past helped me tell my story. I think about them all the time—the choices they did and didn’t have, and how sad and complicated parts of their lives were. So in some ways I felt like I was writing the book to honor these women in my history.”

On “Pieces of My Mother”: An Interview with Melissa Cistaro Read More »

“Geneticists, after all, are studying to see whether there are genes for empathy. I kept asking myself how people are really wired, what traits from our ancestors we carry. This motif is about all the little things we don’t know or aren’t told, or that are kept from us, but that we carry with us—the pieces of us that feel not right, or that are confusing. I’m very much fascinated with the trauma or grief that’s conceivably locked into our bodies—I believe in all that. And in many ways, those women in my past helped me tell my story. I think about them all the time—the choices they did and didn’t have, and how sad and complicated parts of their lives were. So in some ways I felt like I was writing the book to honor these women in my history.”

lsa logoum logoU-M Privacy StatementAccessibility at U-M