Welcome to Litsy!

I decided if I am indeed to start blogging on a more personal note that I should probably revisit the idea of the informal essay. I am doing the great courses lecture series on becoming a better essayist and starting to read one of the recommended books.

#greatcourses #greatcoursesplus #essayist #writer #blogger #literature #blog #writing

Yes yes yes. From a Harper's essay on essays (May 2016). I love this stuff. I love Vivian Gornick. Bring me all the obscure esoteric debates on truth and identity and form in nonfiction, please.

This book feels like a good lecture or a marinade made by a talented cook. You don't so much read it as absorb it and its wisdom. I have learned from Gornick, and appreciate the lesson. The only downside is a feeling of lack of passion for creative nonfiction. Worthwhile nonetheless.

Within himself, the boy turned away to the glorious emptiness before him, to the birds and animals, the fossils and desert striations he found out on the sunbaked Nebraska plain. Here, in this silence, he did not feel alone.

Their presence was lonely-making.

And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back--way back--from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

The memoirist, like the poet and the 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.