Personal Essay

A few notes after creative nonfiction and memoir workshops at University of Iowa:

Patricia Hampl I Could Tell You Stories: This is the narrative engine that drives autobiography: Consciousness, not experience, is the galvanizing core of a personal story.

Vivian Gornick The Situation and the Story: The memoirist, like the poet and novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom ~ or rather the movement toward it ~ that counts.

Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French have just published their edited collection, Essayists on the Essay. They gave a reading Wednesday evening. Although I furiously took notes, I regret I did not write the names of the essayists whose essay definitions I thought were so poetic. Google was not much help this evening. I will have to post my favorites when I can attribute properly to the authors.