Tag Archives: Stories

German Distance, American Naivety

By Michael Lederer

As an Amer­i­can writer liv­ing in Berlin, I strain to under­stand and express some of the dif­fer­ences between my two homes. So many excep­tions to any rule, no broad-brush­stroke of a short essay is going to begin to cap­ture any­thing but the most basic gen­er­al­iza­tion. Still, let me try. Here’s a sto­ry plucked from memory.

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“My Name” – Vignettes about You

By Maria Moss

Vignettes are won­der­ful! Some­times described as a slice of life, vignettes can be so short that they take away the fear of end­ing up with a white page. Unlike a short sto­ry, there’s no defined begin­ning, mid­dle, or end with a cast of char­ac­ters, mul­ti­ple con­flicts, and the ulti­mate res­o­lu­tion phase. Instead, the vignette’s impres­sion­is­tic scenes focus on one moment or give a par­tic­u­lar insight into one char­ac­ter, idea, or setting.

The Mex­i­can Amer­i­can author San­dra Cis­neros is the unchal­lenged queen of vignette writ­ing, and her col­lec­tion of 44 vignettes,  (1984) is a must read.

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Childhood Memories

By Michael Lederer

Mem­o­ries are sto­ries we tell ourselves.

Cred­it: Genia Chef, “Emer­ald Grot­to,” oil on pan­el, 1997 (frag­ment); pub­lished with the artist’s permission

“When I was younger, I remem­ber how…” We cher­ry-pick. We have to. Oth­er­wise, we’d remem­ber what we wore and ate for lunch a day before our 6th birth­day, and the week before that. TMI.   

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Breaking New Ground: Liberating Lomie by Saloma Miller Furlong

By Sabrina Völz

In 2011, Salo­ma Miller Furlong’s Why I Left the Amish: A Mem­oir appeared dur­ing the mem­oir boom that gave agency to invis­i­ble, mar­gin­al­ized, or mis­rep­re­sent­ed groups. Why I Left the Amish was one of the first mem­oirs writ­ten by a for­mer Amish woman that pro­vid­ed unfet­tered per­spec­tives on the Amish. While many Amish groups today lead a sim­ple life much like many rur­al Amer­i­cans in agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties did in the 19th to ear­ly 20th cen­turies, Amish cul­ture is any­thing but sim­ple as Furlong’s newest mem­oir shows.

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All the Stories That We (Were) Told

By Nora Benitt

Pixar’s Rules of Sto­ry­telling by Pro­found Whatever

Life writ­ing – which includes a wide spec­trum of sub-gen­res such as (auto)biography, mem­oir, let­ter, diary, (dig­i­tal) life sto­ries, and oral his­to­ries – has a long tra­di­tion in the U.S. and is becom­ing more and more pop­u­lar all over the world. An abun­dance of arti­facts com­piled by famous, semi-famous, and not-at-all-famous peo­ple fill pub­lic libraries, pri­vate book­shelves, research cen­ters, social media, hard dri­ves, and web­sites. And that’s actu­al­ly not even sur­pris­ing since writ­ing and/or talk­ing about our­selves is a deeply root­ed cul­tur­al prac­tice and comes very nat­u­ral­ly to most human beings. We do it all the time: We tell a sig­nif­i­cant some­one how our day was, we put togeth­er our résumé when apply­ing for a new job, we talk about child­hood mem­o­ries with sib­lings or a close friend. How­ev­er, talk­ing and writ­ing about our­selves in an aca­d­e­m­ic con­text and, to boot, in a for­eign lan­guage is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent story.

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Collaborative Writing – The Final Frontier

By Lynette Kirschner

If you want to go where no man has gone before, why not try your hand at col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing? The idea is sim­ple: Com­bine var­i­ous types of writ­ing in an elec­tive course with a deep under­stand­ing of a spe­cif­ic the­o­ry. The sem­i­nar, “Where no man has gone before: Women and Sci­ence Fic­tion,” was my attempt to have stu­dents not only apply var­i­ous forms of writ­ing but also gain a deep­er knowl­edge of inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty using social sci­ence fic­tion – with a dose of cre­ativ­i­ty. Just look at these stu­dent-pro­duced project covers!

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