AWP, CHICAGO: “As a beginning writer I was told to find my voice,” as if it were something lost, Sue William Silverman said at a Friday AWP panel titled “Containing Multitudes: Shifting Voices in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction.” “Was it under the bed?” Then Sue–author of the best-selling memoirs Because I Remember Terror, Father, I […]
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Archive | March, 2012
AWP Nugget: Immersion Writing
March 3, 2012 
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AWP, CHICAGO: Egads. I’m here to learn, but I wasn’t expecting to find myself facing fundamental questions about my work-in-progress. I do live a life open to possibility, however, and you can’t always control how possibility will manifest. Allow me to back up a bit. I attended a Friday morning AWP panel titled “The Writer […]
Read moreAWP Nugget: Margaret Atwood on Art and Craft
March 2, 2012 32 Comments
AWP, CHICAGO: Margaret Atwood’s books are works of art built though painstaking craft. The same can be said of the remarkable Auditorium Theatre at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, the setting for her keynote address here at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference Thursday night. The Auditorium Theatre is from another age, a gilded […]
Read moreAWP Nugget: Selling Out Everyone You Love (in Brevity)
March 1, 2012 7 Comments
AWP, CHICAGO: Does a writer of memoir–or even a fiction writer painting true stories in camouflage–invariably sell out friends and loved ones? Five nonfiction writers wrestled with that topic here at the first day of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. I summarized the panel for the Brevity blog; you can find […]
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