A Field Guide for Immersion Writing

A Field Guide for Immersion Writing

Author: Robin Hemley

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0820338508

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Discusses the various types of immersion writing, including travel, memoir, and journalism, and explains some of the issues that writers encounter in reporting about the factual world and in describing other people and their own inner experiences.


A Field Guide for Immersion Writing

A Field Guide for Immersion Writing

Author: Robin Hemley

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0820342556

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For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style--immersion writing--Robin Hemley offers new perspectives and practical advice for writers of this nonfiction genre. Immersion writing can be broken down into the broad categories of travel writing, immersion memoir, and immersion journalism. Using the work of such authors as Barbara Ehrenreich, Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Conover, A. J. Jacobs, Nellie Bly, Julio Cortazar, and James Agee, Hemley examines these three major types of immersion writing and further identifies the subcategories of the quest, the experiment, the investigation, the infiltration, and the reenactment. Included in the book are helpful exercises, models for immersion writing, and a chapter on one of the most fraught subjects for nonfiction writers--the ethics and legalities of writing about other people. A Field Guide for Immersion Writing recalibrates and redefines the way writers approach their relationship to their subjects. Suitable for beginners and advanced writers, the book provides an enlightening, provocative, and often amusing look at the ways in which nonfiction writers engage with the world around them. A Friends Fund Publication.


Looking for Transwonderland

Looking for Transwonderland

Author: Noo Saro-Wiwa

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 159376491X

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A “remarkable chronicle” of a journey back to this West African nation after years of exile (The New York Times Book Review). Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to visit her father in Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. After her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was killed there, she didn’t return for several years. Then she decided to come to terms with the country her father given his life for. Traveling from the exuberant chaos of Lagos to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; from the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the decrepit kitsch of the Transwonderland Amusement Park, she explores Nigerian Christianity, delves into the country’s history of slavery, examines the corrupting effect of oil, and ponders the huge success of Nollywood. She finds the country as exasperating as ever, and frequently despairs at the corruption and inefficiency she encounters. But she also discovers that it is far more beautiful and varied than she had ever imagined, with its captivating thick tropical rain forest and ancient palaces and monuments—and most engagingly and entertainingly, its unforgettable people. “The author allows her love-hate relationship with Nigeria to flavor this thoughtful travel journal, lending it irony, wit and frankness.” —Kirkus Reviews


The Art of Creative Research

The Art of Creative Research

Author: Philip Gerard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 022617980X

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Everyone who writes a novel, a poem, or a memoir almost certainly conducts research along the waywhether to develop a story idea, or to capture the voice, the speech patterns, or the exact words of a character, or to ensure authenticity or accuracy of detail in describing a person, a place, an object, a setting. This kind of experiential research is an art form of its own, and this book is the first to treat it as such. Addressing writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Philip Gerard covers all the different kinds of archives that might inform creative work, including historical documents, site visits, interviews, and memory. He offers practical tips for drawing on these different types of sources, including such mundane matters as planning and budgeting for travel costs, arranging access in advance, and troubleshooting when plans go awry. And he illustrates how the insights gleaned from research can be incorporated into stories, poems, and nonfiction using examples from a wide range of writers."


Immersion

Immersion

Author: Ted Conover

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-10-24

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 022611306X

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Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning 'Newjack', have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting. In 'Immersion', Conover distills decades of knowledge into an accessible resource aimed at writers of all levels.


A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Author: Rebecca Solnit

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-06-27

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1101118717

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“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.


Reply All

Reply All

Author: Robin Hemley

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2012-06-04

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0253001803

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"Reply All, the third collection of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception. A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave everyday; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chief's words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks he's fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own nobility by hiring a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcast their affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets. The ways in which humans fool themselves are infinite, and while these stories illustrate this sad fact in sometimes excruciating detail, the aim is not to skewer the misdirected, but to commiserate with them and blush in recognition."--P. [4] of cover.


A Field Guide to Grad School

A Field Guide to Grad School

Author: Jessica McCrory Calarco

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0691201102

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An essential handbook to the unwritten and often unspoken knowledge and skills you need to succeed in grad school Some of the most important things you need to know in order to succeed in graduate school—like how to choose a good advisor, how to get funding for your work, and whether to celebrate or cry when a journal tells you to revise and resubmit an article—won’t be covered in any class. They are part of a hidden curriculum that you are just expected to know or somehow learn on your own—or else. In this comprehensive survival guide for grad school, Jessica McCrory Calarco walks you through the secret knowledge and skills that are essential for navigating every critical stage of the postgraduate experience, from deciding whether to go to grad school in the first place to finishing your degree and landing a job. An invaluable resource for every prospective and current grad student in any discipline, A Field Guide to Grad School will save you grief—and help you thrive—in school and beyond. Provides invaluable advice about how to: Choose and apply to a graduate program Stay on track in your program Publish and promote your work Get the most out of conferences Navigate the job market Balance teaching, research, service, and life


Monsoon Mansion

Monsoon Mansion

Author: Cinelle Barnes

Publisher: Little a

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781542046145

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Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a family's rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it. Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother's opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father's self-made success, it was a girl's storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother's terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle's fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined. Formerly a home worthy of magazines and lavish parties, Mansion Royale becomes a dangerous shell of the splendid palace it had once been. In this remarkable ode to survival, Cinelle creates something magical out of her truth--underscored by her complicated relationship with her mother. Through a tangle of tragedy and betrayal emerges a revelatory journey of perseverance and strength, of grit and beauty, and of coming to terms with the price of family--and what it takes to grow up.


Dictatorland

Dictatorland

Author: Paul Kenyon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 1784972150

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A Financial Times Book of the Year 'Jaw-dropping' Daily Express 'Grimly fascinating' Financial Times 'Humane, timely, accessible and well-researched' Irish Times The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people. The Libyan army officer who authored a new work of political philosophy, The Green Book, and lived in a tent with a harem of female soldiers, running his country like a mafia family business. And behind these almost incredible stories of fantastic violence and excess lie the dark secrets of Western greed and complicity, the insatiable taste for chocolate, oil, diamonds and gold that has encouraged dictators to rule with an iron hand, siphoning off their share of the action into mansions in Paris and banks in Zurich and keeping their people in dire poverty.