by Cynthia Newberry Martin | May 20, 2009 | journeys, memoir, place, reviews |
It’s often what grabs us when we are very little that becomes our passion. We can remember the moment. For me, it was a morning in kindergarten. I must have been five. One of the kid’s mothers put on a puppet show–in French. I was smitten. I...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | May 7, 2009 | craft of writing, memoir, memory, reviews, time |
Frank Conroy was the director of the Iowa Writers Workshop for 18 years. He was also a writer himself, the author of 5 books, including the “classic memoir” Stop-Time. He died of colon cancer in 2005 at the age of 69. “My faith in the firmness of...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Feb 10, 2009 | memoir |
Don’t you hate when this happens to one of your books? I ordered May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep online. I was excited as I was pulling the book out of the padded envelope…only to find it had made its entire journey with the bottom right corner...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 19, 2008 | memoir, the day |
My desk this morning, instead of being covered with books and manuscript pages, is covered with Christmas lists. I wanted to make a post. But it was hard to draw my mind away from the unanswered questions and undone errands on my list–with the clock ticking. ...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 24, 2008 | memoir, memory, reviews |
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a new preface. In it, she called...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 8, 2008 | Dani Shapiro, memoir, novels, truth |
Playing with Fire was Dani Shapiro’s first novel. It was published in 1989. It begins, “There are many versions to this story…” And indeed, nine years later, the author published another version–“the true story,” the...