Archive for the ‘ON WRITING’ Category
Dreaming With Christina
I met Christina Ball first day of freshman year at Bowdoin College. She was my roommate and she arrived in our room with an entourage: a sister, a brother, a mother and father, a grandmother. They crowded in, inspected, turned over pillows, looked out windows, absorbed us — my father and me. We’d arrived first, [...]
Filed under: FRIENDS, ON WRITING, Travel | 2 Comments
Tags: Bowdoin College, Christina Ball, Dreaming in Umbria, Italy, Roccafiore, Speak Language Center, Todi
Dreaming In Umbria
Dreaming in Umbria Creative Writing Workshop with Martha McPhee JUNE 9-16, 2012 Italianist, Christina Ball, is hosting a writing workshop at the luxury spa and wellness center, Roccafiori, in Todi, Italy in June 2012. She’s invited me to lead the workshops and I would love you all to come. Find out more …
Filed under: FOR STUDENTS, FRIENDS, ON WRITING, Travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: Christina Ball, Roccafiori, Speak Language Center, Todi, Umbria, Writing Workshop
There are three necessary elements in a story—exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as “John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X”; development as “One day Mrs. Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man”; and drama as “You will do nothing of the kind,” he [...]
Filed under: FOR STUDENTS, ON WRITING, Quotes | Leave a Comment
Tags: Frank O'Connor
From The San Francisco Chronicle — Review by Martha McPhee The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim By Jonathan Coe (Alfred A. Knopf; 314 pages; $26.95) At the beginning of Jonathan Coe’s beguiling new novel, “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim,” Max, in Australia visiting his estranged father, observes a Chinese woman and her young daughter [...]
Filed under: ON WRITING | 1 Comment
Tags: Jonathan Coe, Knopf, SFGate, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
The Center For Fiction launches its online magazine, The Literarian. My contribution: Five Favorite Novels About Women Behaving Badly Gone With the Wind As young girl watching the Million Dollar Movie with my sisters, I met Scarlett O’Hara and fell in love. Her dark curls and green eyes, her swishing hoop dress–determined and strong and brave, [...]
Filed under: ON WRITING, READINGS | Leave a Comment
Tags: Anna Karenina, Gone With The Wind, Madame Bovary, The Center for Fiction, The House of Mirth, The Literarian, Vanity Fair
Shaping The Story
From Stephen Koch’s wonderful and very useful Writer’s Workshop. He was a professor of mine at Columbia University. “In Chapter 1, we pointed out that the Latin root of the word invent means “to discover.” Writers do not make up stories. They find them. They uncover them; they discover them. Sometimes they find them [...]
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Tags: Stephen Koch, Writer's Workshop
What a lot of fun. I love Telluride. I loved meeting Maribeth Clemente. She was the ski instructor of some friends’ children. They invited my son to join the instruction — lucky son, then lucky me. Maribeth and I discovered we were both writers. Over the summer she read Dear Money and interviewed me for [...]
Filed under: On Dear Money, ON WRITING | 2 Comments
Tags: Bonjour Colorado, Dani Shapiro, Devotion, Maribeth Clemente, Telluride
Explore
jennymcphee.com Jenny’s fantastic new website
Filed under: FAMILY, ON WRITING | Leave a Comment
Tags: Jenny McPhee
Jenny, my sister, is now reviewing for Bookslut, the brilliant book review site. She has a column called The Bombshell. Read it and enjoy. Also be aware: she’s about to launch her own site any day now: jennymcphee.com. At the end of Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, the biographer [...]
Filed under: FAMILY, ON WRITING, Sisters Discuss | 1 Comment
Tags: Bookslut, Emily Dickinson, Jenny McPhee, Lyndall Gordon
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