Archive for October 2013

One of the characters in my new novel Little Island is an empty nester, her only son having just left for college. I am an empty nester now too, as I spent the summer feeding baby birds at the Vermont Institute for Natural Science. It was a life-changing experience. I’ve printed the beginning of the blog below. But a…

I like to teach memoir, because memoir bridges the space between fiction and non-fiction. I encourage students to employ tools of the fiction writer: character, setting, and plot. Fiction writers have three avenues from which to generate material: observation, imagination, and investigation. Memoirists have all these available as well. One difference, it is said, between…