I am an appreciative recipient of this holiday season’s most exciting book: a volume bearing the title “Reflections in Light and Shadow, an Anthology of Short Memoirs” (Sunshine Place, Manila, 2022). The book is the harvest from a memoir-writing workshop in 2021-2022 during the pandemic and was conducted at the Sunshine Place, Senior Recreation Center […]
Drama Desk Award-winning playwright turned Best Adapted Screenplay contender Samuel D. Hunter understands that certain folks may have reservations about going to see his new autofictional film “ The Whale ,” in which Brendan Fraser plays a 600-pound recluse attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter. Still, he hopes people realize it is more than […]
Yes, it’s true, Markus Dohle is leaving his position as CEO of Penguin Random House , in what is clear fallout from the failed attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster. Dohle, who pushed hard for the attempted merger, said in his letter of resignation that: Following the antitrust decision in the U.S. against the merger […]
How do good stories start? In the middle of the action? With a slow buildup to the action? What would you say is the literary definition of exposition, and how can knowing it help you write better stories? Exposition is a literary term that deals with how to start a story. In this article, I’ll […]
For years, tech writers have been warning about how AI will eliminate the need for all kinds of human-staffed professions from truck driving to portfolio management. Turns out, the AI bots are really coming for us. That’s becoming increasingly clear amidst the ongoing tech world buzz around OpenAI ’s newly launched ChatGPT writing bot. Today’s […]
‘A Place Called Home: A Memoir’ By David Ambroz c. 2022, Legacy Lit/Hachette $30/384 pages For David Ambroz, 42, author of the stunning new memoir “A Place Called Home,” one of his childhood recollections is of himself and his siblings walking with Mary, their mother, on a freezing Christmas morning in New York City. Today, […]
“A secret, I think, can be fatal,” said acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan. “She died with her secret intact.” That secret McEwan is talking about was a personal one held by his mother: “She would give birth to a baby boy, and she gave that child away. The moment she gave that child away, I think […]
Multihyphenate Kirk Thatcher has been involved with a vast range of iconic movies and television over the past 40 years. From his first job, on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi no less, Thatcher has been crafting beloved stories that reach into all corners of fandom as a writer, director, producer, actor, and visual effects […]
Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir “Uncultured” explores the parallels between her childhood in the Children of God and her time serving in the U.S. army The first chapter of Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir Uncultured opens with a screech: It is 1993 and Mestyanek Young—then 5 years old—is inside a commune in Brazil, standing at the back […]
‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World , which was published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties. Rich was known for her feminist writings as well as her poetry, and this fact is relevant […]
