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How To Write a Novel in 20 Pies
As a novelist, memoirist, and associate director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Amy Wallen has a few things to say about the writing world, many of them irreverent and snarky. From her perspective as a teacher, mentor, and published author, her belief is that the way to survive the hard knocks of writing a book and trying to get published is to bust a gut working, laughing, and eating pie. With chapters including "Oh Agent, Where Art Thou?", "Revising, Rewriting, and Reimagining," and "The Joy of Rejection," Wallen balances out the challenging stages of the writing process with both sweet and savory goodness, featuring recipes for chocolate pecan pie, salmon and portobello p...
When We Were Ghouls
When Amy E. Wallen's southern, blue-collar, peripatetic family was transferred from Ely, Nevada, to Lagos, Nigeria, she had just turned seven. From Nevada to Nigeria and on to Peru, Bolivia, and Oklahoma, the family wandered the world, living in a state of constant upheaval. When We Were Ghouls follows Wallen's recollections of her family who, like ghosts, came and went and slipped through her fingers, rendering her memories unclear. Were they a family of grave robbers, as her memory of the pillaging of a pre-Incan grave site indicates? Are they, as the author's mother posits, "hideous people?" Or is Wallen's memory out of focus? In this quick-paced and riveting narrative, Wallen exorcizes t...
It's Fun to Be a Person I Don't Know
Chachi D. Hauser combines memoir, cultural criticism, and poetic modes to examine gender identity and her relationship to Walt Disney and the Disney company.
A Certain Loneliness
After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair—but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain. A Certain Loneliness is a meditative and engaging memoir-in-essays that explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and female desire with frankness and humor. Lambert presents the adventures of flourishing within a world of uncertain tomorrows: kayaking alone through swamps with alligators; negotiating planes, trains, and ski lifts; scoring free drugs from dangerous men; getting trapped in a too-deep snow drift without crutches. A Certain Loneliness is literature of the body, palpable and present, in which Lambert’s lifelong struggle with isolation and independence—complete with tiresome frustrations, slapstick moments, and grand triumphs—are wound up in the long history of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
Anything Will Be Easy After This
Bethany Maile had a mythological American West in mind when she returned to Idaho after dropping out of college in Boston, only to find a farm-town-turned-suburb instead of the Wild West wonderland she remembered. Haunted by what she had so completely misremembered, Maile resolved to investigate her attachment to the western myth, however flawed. Deciding to engage in a variety of "western" events, Maile trailed rodeo queens, bid on cattle, fired .22s at the gun range, and searched out wild horses. With lively reportage and a sharp wit, she recounts her efforts to understand how the western myth is outdated yet persistent while ultimately exploring the need for story and the risks inherent to that need. Anything Will Be Easy after This traces Maile's evolution from a girl suckered by a busted-down story to a more knowing woman who discovers a new narrative that enchants without deluding.
If This Were Fiction
Playing like a lively mixtape in both subject and style, If This Were Fiction takes on gender-based violence, trauma, recovery, and motherhood, focusing an open-hearted, frequently funny, clear-eyed feminist lens on Jill Christman’s first fifty years.
Let Me Count the Ways
Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn’t intended. Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.
The Sound of Undoing
A memoir in essays, The Sound of Undoing deconstructs the way sound has overwhelmingly shaped Paige Towers's life. Each essay focuses on a different sound, some perceptible--like the sound of a loon call or gunshot--and others abstract--like the sound of awakening. Given a hypersensitivity to noise from which she has both suffered and benefited since childhood, Towers uses these sounds as a starting point for making sense of past events. She reflects on the estrangement of a beloved sister, sexual abuse and assault, and the link between mental illness and noise in her family, as well as nature, religion, violence, and other themes. Experimental in form and provocative in content, The Sound of Undoing also makes use of research on silence, nature and noise pollution, listening, sound art, autonomous sensory meridian response, and the acoustic environment in general. By exploring memories and feelings triggered by certain noises, this lyrical meditation untangles a life infused with meaning through sound.
What Becomes You
"Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn," Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal processes involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both an "astonished" parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women's experience and men's lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual--and unusually fascinating--reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living.
How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
Many are haunted and obsessed by their own eventual deaths, but perhaps no one as much as Sue William Silverman. This thematically linked collection of essays charts Silverman’s attempt to confront her fears of that ultimate unknown. Her dread was fomented in part by a sexual assault, hidden for years, that led to an awareness that death and sex are in some ways inextricable, an everyday reality many women know too well. Through gallows humor, vivid realism, and fantastical speculation, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences explores this fear of death and the author’s desire to survive it. From cruising New Jersey’s industry-blighted landscape in a gold Plymouth to visiting the emergency room for maladies both real and imagined to suffering the stifling strictness of an intractable piano teacher, Silverman guards her memories for the same reason she resurrects archaic words—to use as talismans to ward off the inevitable. Ultimately, Silverman knows there is no way to survive death physically. Still, through language, commemoration, and metaphor, she searches for a sliver of transcendent immortality.
