Now This is Cool: Non-Profit Dedicated to Studying the Brain Through Writing

Oliver Sacks died just a couple of days ago: August 30, 2015. I miss him already. His writing--elegant, precise, and compassionate--inspires me not just to be a better writer, but to be a better human. He believed in the power of story to heal and to better understand the human mind.

While doing some research on his life, I found this: The Oliver Sacks Foundation. Then I got all excited when I read this:


The Oliver Sacks Foundation is a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing understanding of the human brain and mind through the power of narrative nonfiction and case histories.

The foundation’s goals include making Dr. Sacks’s published and yet-unpublished writings available to the broadest possible audience, preserving and digitizing materials related to his life and work and making them available for scholarly use, working to reduce the stigma of mental and neurological illness, and supporting a humane approach to neurology and psychiatry. (emphasis mine)

Those of us who love to read already know the power of storytelling to make meaning from our lives and better understand our internal worlds. I've never bought into the dividing line between art and science, between what we think is quantifiable and what we think is not. Sacks clearly felt the same, using his tremendous writing talent to share the experiences of and humanize his patients and himself.

Narrative nonfiction, you guys! Let's get into it!

I remember you, Oliver Sacks, M.D. RIP.

How to Write a Synopsis of Your Book

I came across these resources almost by accident today. I'm always surprised by how difficult it feels to write a synopsis; so much happens in a book that it isn't easy to sum it up in a few short pages. But, like the rest of my writing, if I feel I have a strategy in place, it becomes much simpler and less daunting.

Literary Agent Maria Vicente recently posted a few guidelines about writing a synopsis:

Memoir Craft: Grappling With Memory in Warm Springs (Part 3)

In Part 1, I wrote about Susan Richards Shreve's craft technique of writing about her memory within the creative narrative of her memoir, Warm Springs. She begins immediately with the word "traces" and its double meaning: the small responses still evident in muscles atrophied by polio, and the flashes of memory she mines from her time living at the polio hospital.

In Part 2, we looked at the beautiful scene describing Shreve's first memory, one that could not have happened, but she insists she remembers.

Memoir Craft: Grappling With Memory in Warm Springs (Part 2)

In Part 1, I wrote about the first example of Susan Richard's Shreve's craft technique of making transparent her process of grappling with memory. In her memoir Warm Springs, she employs the metaphor of being examined by doctors to find "traces" of muscle movement in her legs, which have been decimated by polio. Each muscle requires her complete concentration, patience, and focus; recovering her memories, she says, requires the same effort, even if it is only to find "traces" of them.

The second example is a stunning, one-page chapter titled "Memory in Process" in which Shreve recalls her first memory. She is one and half years old and recovering from polio. Her mother walks in and approaches her crib:

This Week's Wanna Read: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This book is so hot right now. People who haven't read it are talking about it, that's how hot, how relevant, how urgent, how beautifully written this book is. I'm here talking about it, like I did in that previous sentence, and I haven't read it. For now, I'm accepting that I will find the book to meet all of those adjectives, because the consensus is just that strong.

If Toni Morrison agrees to endorse your book and describes it as "required reading"--then refers to the writer as the successor to James Baldwin--it's going to gain a lot of attention.

I found some interesting, lesser-read reviews online, including one from the blog "The Christian Century." The writer is a Christian, and speaks against the comments of religious people who have derided the book because they find Coates' atheism an insurmountable obstacle to engaging with his message:

Memoir Craft: Grappling with Memory in Warm Springs (Part 1)

Susan Richards Shreve is concerned with memory--its accuracy, reliability, power, and how various people can experience the same events and have entirely different memories of those events.

In Warm Springs, her memoir of spending two childhood years at a polio hospital, she is determined to tell the truth. The truth, as the reader discovers during the story, is established by Shreve in part by making transparent her process of grappling with memory.

On three occasions she takes time--within the story itself--to let us into her process. The first is immediate: the word "traces," which is in the subtitle and is the focus of the first brief chapter.

John Ashbery is Eighty-Effin'-Eight And He Wrote Another Book

Creepy picture? Or the creepiest picture?

The great, renowned, Pulitzer Prize-National Book Award-Robert Frost Medal-etc.etc.-winning America poet John Ashbery turned eighty-eight last week. Eighty-effin'-eight, guys. And he just wrote another book of poetry. Another effin' book. He's already published twenty-something books.

LitHub published a poem, "The Upright Piano," from his new book Breezeway. It's the best kind of Ashbery: full of imagery, asks a lot of questions, knows itself, invites you in, but still makes you think about what the hell is going on. Here's the first stanza:

Did we once go to bed together?
And how was it? I need your help on this one.
Good thing it happened, too—
Intelligence without understanding
is like constant frost, pounding at the temples
until its bargain is overseen. I kid you not.

I know Ashbery's style is controversial and hyper-analyzed and over-scholarized (?) etc. but I just like him. I think he's funny and wise. After losing Mark Strand last year, I'm just really glad this poet is still walking the planet.

Emotional Physicality in Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home

Read this.

This memoir is gorgeous and heartbreaking. Some people define it as a "grief memoir," but I believe it is first and foremost a friendship memoir, as the subtitle states on the cover. That's what I think of when I think of this book.

Caldwell creates such a close emotional connection with the reader that our empathy kicks into high gear. She does this partly by describing her physical response to emotion which invites us into the immediacy, the urgency of the scene.

Near the beginning of her story, Caldwell and her dog are taking a long walk in a park--where she and Caroline Knapp often walked together with their dogs--and is suddenly overwhelmed with grief from the loss of Caroline, her closest friend: “I felt a desolation so great,” she writes, “that for a moment my knees wouldn’t work.” The attachment between her and Caroline has been ripped apart by Caroline's death, and the result is a profound, physical grief.

Six-Word Memoirs and a T-Shirt Maybe

Just discovered this book titled Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. (Should six-word be hyphenated? Does it matter? It's distracting me.) The title grabbed me the way flash fiction does: it's short! I can read it easy! I know that's illogical, considering how dense good short writing has to be, how much it makes you think. Maybe I just want to think sometimes instead of read.

Exercises that have helped me a lot over the years involve strictly enforced word counts. Recently I answered the question "Why did you attend your first writing workshop?" I had to write it in 100 words or less. Doesn't sound like a big deal until you actually try to do it, and the discipline it requires makes the writing sharper, clearer, and more succinct. It also works your brain in a different way, which feels refreshing after long sessions thinking about craft, content, or character.

Here are a few examples. They sound a little like haiku when you read them out loud.