Minerva Rising Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

My Writing Process Blog Tour

therestlessnest2019-11-13T16:23:33-08:00Categories: faith and doubt, reading|Tags: Allison Green, Anne Lamott, Elizabeth McCracken, Isla McKetta, Kim Brown, memoir, Michael Klein, Minerva Rising, My Writing Process Blog Tour, writing|

I’ve been tagged in the My Writing Process Blog Tour by Kim Brown, editor of the wonderful Minerva Rising literary journal. Check out what Kim’s been up to at http://www.the-confident-writer.net. This blog is a relay that involves answering four specific questions and then naming the authors who will follow. So here we go: What am I working on?? I am working on the first draft of my second memoir. (My first, Her Beautiful Brain, will be published this September by She Writes Press.) The working title for this book is The Observant Doubter. It’s about my own checkered history of faith and doubt. How does my work differ from others of its genre? Memoir is a slippery, shape-shifting sort of a genre, so this is a difficult question to answer. For me, memoir is not autobiography but more like extended essay writing, a way to explore what have become (like it or not) the enduring themes of my life. And I do mean “explore.” What I love about writing memoir are the new insights that come as you write about events in your life that you might have thought you already understood in every possible way. The memoir writers I admire include Anne Lamott, Elizabeth McCracken and Michael Klein. What I love about their work is that it asks questions. It meanders. It doesn’t follow a straight chronological line. Why do I write what I do? My first book was driven by a need to honor my mother’s life and to articulate the uniquely cruel fate [...]

Hiatus: the Mid-term Report

Gravel bar: my favorite hiatus phrase. So far. See photo, at left, of the view from our Fourth of July campsite in the heart of the Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest. Who knew that in the middle of one of the shadiest, mossiest, wettest places on the planet we would find a sun-drenched spot called Five Mile Island on one of the Hoh’s 50 or so miles of braided gravel bars? We splashed our sweat off in the icy water and set up our tent. Then we sat in the sun and read, trading back and forth an unlikely pair of books: War by Candlelight, Daniel Alarcón’s luminous stories of Peru, and What Darwin Really Said by Benjamin Farrington. Truth: the real reason these two books made the backpack cut was because they are slim. But they delivered. Alarcón is a master of the first line that hooks you, helplessly: “They’d been living in the apartment for ten days when David was first asked to disappear.” “The day before a stray bomb buried him in the Peruvian jungle, Fernando sat with José Carlos and together they meditated on death.” “Every year on Mayra’s birthday, since she turned one, I have asked Sonia to marry me.” Then he reels you in, and sends you flying from the gravel bar to New York, to the Amazonian jungle, to Lima. Alarcón’s genius is to slip from sight, to leave us alone with his characters and without any overhanging awareness of his authorial presence—so that, at the end of [...]