"Remember that standard journalism legend in which two cars crash in an intersection, five people witness it, and, minutes later, all five people tell different stories about what happened? This exercise doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already: people lie, memory fails. But it does confront us with choices." - Laura Wexler, from her essay "Saying Good-Bye to "Once Upon A Time," or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction"
Quote of the Day: Sunday, September 18, 2005
"...implementing the principles of postmodernism in creative nonfiction means taking standard journalistic operating procedure further. It means literary structures and techniques that are the formal embodiment of these principles, such that readers have not only a cerebral, but also a visceral, experience." - Laura Wexler, from her Essay, "Saying Good-Bye to 'Once Upon a Time,' or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction"
Quote of the Day: Saturday, September 17, 2005
"Your positionality affects your perceptions of the world and, at the same time, your perceptions of the world affect your positionality." - Laura Wexler, from her Essay, "Saying Goodbye to 'Once Upon a Time,' or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction"
Quote of the Day: Friday, September 15, 2005
"The bedrock principle of postmodernism is subjectivity, the idea that the world looks different depending where you stand, both literally and figuratively. The fancy name for this is positionality; a variety of things - race, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, educational level, experiences - combine to produce your positionality." - Laura Wexler, from her Essay, "Saying Goodbye to 'Once Upon a Time,' or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction"
Quote of the Day: Thursday, September 15, 2005
"What is new is not what we tell, but how we tell it. The lyric essay is one way to do this: it demands (or perhaps gently asks, with a knowing smile) that we stay awake to the chance associations and intuitive connections that make life bearable. Or really, to be more precise, it asks us to create those very connections through the act of writing, to follow a chain of those connections as far as they will go and pinch them together in the end." - Brenda Miller, from her Essay, "A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay"