The Tune of True Stories
True stories come in all forms. From Elizabethan murder ballads to rap songs, music has been a font of stories drawn from real life. But how much does truth really matter when it comes to songs? First, there’s the question of narrative itself. For example, Nick Cave, front man for Australian alternative-rock band the Bad Seeds, has moved...
Writing from the Space Between Us
by Hannah Morgan The New York Times recently published an article by Joshua Rothman entitled “Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy,” and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. In the piece, Rothman analyzes excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway and comes to the conclusion that Woolf conceives of life as “a gift that you’ve been given, which...
Are We Taking the Thought out of Nonfiction?
by Hannah Morgan We’ve all heard it a million times: “Show, don’t tell.” In creative writing classrooms nation-wide, this is the guideline. So, naturally, a commonly voiced criticism in workshops is something like: “This doesn’t need to be stated outright; it would be more engaging if the reader could glean it from the scene.” I have...
The Role of Narrative in Medicine
Sayantani DasGupta, a faculty member at Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine, lends her perspective on the importance of narrative in medicinal practice to Creative Nonfiction Magazine in the article “Narrative Medicine, Narrative Humility.” The article is definitely worth a read in full, but below is a particularly poignant excerpt: “Narrative Medicine is the clinical and scholarly movement...
The Case for Really Reading
We recently blogged about an article by Tim Parks wherein he suggests that we don’t need stories. Parks admits that the idea that stories help us “to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social world we move in” seems viable, but he dissents, claiming that there is no way around the truth...
