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 Sacks’s published and yet-unpublished writings available to the broadest possible audience, preserving and digitizing materials related to his life and work and making them available for scholarly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:

9 Current Calls for Nonfiction Submissions

Let's check out some opportunities for nonfiction writers!

I keep a running list of potential markets for my work by scouring a variety of sources, including Literary Hub, The Review Review, NewPages, Places for Writers, and a bunch of other sites. You can check them out to find more options, including poetry, fiction, and cross-genre.

I'm happy to share this with you, in the spirit of writers helping writers. As usual, submit your best work and read the guidelines carefully.

Read the New, Digital, Annotated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Tag this latest edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "literary coolness:"

From Medium:

An annotated edition — twelve Lewis Carroll scholars taking a chapter each. A joint project from The Public Domain Review and Medium, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the classic tale.

Here's an example from Chapter 1...

"The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well."

...with an annotation by Zoe Jaques:

"‘[N]ot a moment to think’: Carroll’s repeated references to Alice’s lack of reflection on her entry to Wonderland recalls both the impulsive nature of childhood and also the undirected and non-reflective manner of dreaming."

Read the text, complete with annotations, here on Medium. And definitely check out Arthur Rackhman's beautiful illustrations.

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.

New Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald Published in The Strand Magazine

The Strand has just published a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald titled "Temperature." Until recently, Fitzgerald's story about Emmet Monsen, a good-looking Hollywood actor whose health, career, and personal life are in decline, lay undiscovered in the Fitzgerald archives at Princeton University. Andrew Gulli, editor of The Strand who scours archives for lost short stories by famous authors, hit the jackpot. Gulli describes the story for The Seattle Times:

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.

This Week's Wanna Read: On The Move by Oliver Sacks

Easy. Oliver Sacks, guys.

This man knows how to blend precise command of the English language with elegant craft to create beautiful, readable prose. He never talks down or condescends in any way. He weaves medical terminology into his writing, defines it for the layperson, while still respecting the reader's intelligence.

His autobiography, On The Move, was released in April of this year. It's on the back burner because I have so much work to do right now, but I know I'll get to this one.

Three Celebrity Memoirs That Are Worth Your Time

In the previous post, I expressed hope but skepticism about Shonda Rhimes' upcoming book, Year Of Yes. I really want it to be good and honest and engaging and not consumer-driven "inspirational" claptrap. But I do have hope, because I have read memoirs by celebrities that are elegantly written, insightful, and tell a great story.

Here are three of my favorites.

Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi

De Rossi honestly and poignantly recounts her life in the business of modeling and acting (and why she changed her name). The main thread of the book is her struggle with body image and eating disorders. It's wonderful reading because she captures the narrative within the frame of the dysfunctional mind. She's a subtly unreliable narrator when it comes to her body.

One revealing example occurs while de Rossi is being photographed for a magazine. The photographer complements her body, saying how beautiful and healthy she is, adding that he sees a lot of sick bodies in the studio. Hearing this, de Rossi thinks to herself: I gotta get me one of those sick bodies.

From the Los Angeles Times:

In prose as simply elegant — and as powerful — as a little black dress, De Rossi weaves together three themes — the impact of a loving, but lonely girlhood as the child of a single mother, the corrosive effect of constant doubts about her appearance and the internal struggle over her sexuality