Michael N. McGregor

Author: Michael N. McGregor

  • Speaking at a Celebration of Robert Lax at Poets House in NYC: 7 p.m., Friday, November 30

    Speaking at a Celebration of Robert Lax at Poets House in NYC: 7 p.m., Friday, November 30

    If you live in or around New York City, come down to Poets House at 10 River Terrace at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 30, for a Celebration of Robert Lax on his 103rd birthday.  I’ll be sharing stories about Lax and reading some of his poems, along with poet and former Lax literary assistant John Beer and poet Stacey Tran.  Lax’s niece and literary executor, Marcia Kelly, will be in attendance too.  It should be a wonderful evening of great poetry, fellowship and reminiscences.  The cost is: $10, $7 for seniors & students, free for Poets House members.

    Note: We were hoping we’d have copies available of New Directions’ reissue of Lax’s classic collection 33 Poems, but publication has been delayed until next February.  We’ll have advance copies for you to look at, though.

  • More About my Writing Residency in China This Fall

    I announced a couple of months ago that I’ve been asked to be a resident writer at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, this fall.

    I have a few more details about it:

    The residency is sponsored by the English Creative Writing Center at Sun Yat-Sen University, the only program in China focused on creative writing in English.  The programs founder and director is a writer herself, Dai Fan.

    The residency begins on October 22 and lasts through Nov. 18.   For the first two weeks, we’ll be in Yangshou in the Guangxi Autonomous Region with no duties other than writing.  (The featured image here, of Yangshou, is from the China and Asia Cultural Travel website.)  Next, we’ll spend a week at Sun Yat-sen’s main campus in Guangzhou, giving talks and readings and meeting with faculty and students.  Then, the last week, we’ll be back to writing, this time in Meizhou in Guangdong Province.

    I’ll be there with seven writers from six other countries–for information on them and their work, click on their names below:

    Charlson Ong, the Philippines

    Elisa Biagini, Italy

    James Scudamore, Great Britain

    Monica Aasprong, Norway

    Sally Ito, Canada

    Vladimir Poleganov, Bulgaria

    Zdravka Evtimova, Bulgaria

    I’ll post some of their work in the days ahead.

    I haven’t been blogging on this site lately but I will during my time in China.  For now, if you’re interested in learning more about the program and what I’ll be experiencing, check out this edition of Ninth Letter with links to creative works by participants in the program two years ago.

  • An Essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s THE EVERGLADES in the September Issue of TIN HOUSE

    An Essay on Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s THE EVERGLADES in the September Issue of TIN HOUSE

    My first trip to Florida this past March introduced me to all kinds of new things: alligators, islands called keys, spring break on Miami Beach, Cape Canaveral, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the amazing writer and environmentalist whose name is on the Florida school where 17 students and staff were murdered earlier this year.

    Although Douglas published the definitive book on the Everglades in 1947–The Everglades: River of Grass–her work is not as appreciated today as it should be.  To do my small part to remedy the oversight, I wrote a piece for Tin House magazine’s Lost & Found section.  You’ll find it in the new September issue, out tomorrow.

    Douglas was 108 when she died in 1998, old enough to have cut her advocacy teeth in the struggle for women’s suffrage.  You can get a taste of her remarkable career as a journalist, fiction writer and activist on her Wikipedia page.

    Or, for a quick list of 13 things to know about her, try this page.

  • Another Piece on Brian Doyle: Turning MINK RIVER into a Play

    Another Piece on Brian Doyle: Turning MINK RIVER into a Play

    Oregon Arts Watch just published my piece about a Northwest theater director and playwright turning Brian Doyle’s novel Mink River into a play.  You can read it here: http://www.orartswatch.org/brian-doyle-and-the-language-of-the-stage/

  • Still Crazy (to Write Fiction) After All These Years

    Still Crazy (to Write Fiction) After All These Years

    Twenty-one years ago, I graduated from Columbia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program with a focus on fiction writing.  My intention was to find a job teaching fiction writing and focus on writing short stories and novels, all of which I did…for a while.

    My first teaching job was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I taught three sections of fiction writing each term, with an occasional literature class, while advising the student magazine, Grassroots.  During the three years I spent there, I revised and published four short stories I had written in graduate school, one of which, Fireline, published in StoryQuarterly, went on to win both an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and the Daniel Curley Award for Short Fiction.  I completed the novel that had been my thesis too, and found an agent for it.  So far, everything was going according to plan…

    But I couldn’t find a permanent job in Fiction and, since I had a solid journalism background and had published a number of essays and profiles in publications such as Poets & Writers, I started applying for Nonfiction jobs.  I was ultimately hired by Portland State University in 2000 to help found its graduate program in nonfiction writing.  When the agent failed to sell my novel, I started shifting my energies more and more into nonfiction and, although I worked on another novel for a time, I left fiction behind.

    Now that I’m retired from teaching, I’m able to go back to my first love.  I’m working on that set-aside novel again and I recently published a short story–my first in 17 years–in Inkwell.  It’s called “O Kairos” and features a Greek couple scratching out a living on a small island.  You can read the beginning of it here.

  • Utne Reader Republishes My Profile of Brian Doyle

    Utne Reader Republishes My Profile of Brian Doyle

    In February, Kerry Temple, editor of Notre Dame Magazine, which had published my profile of writer and friend Brian Doyle in its Autumn 2017 issue, forwarded a message from Christian Williams, Editor-in-Chief at Utne Reader.  He had just read my “beautiful tribute” to Brian, Williams wrote, and wanted to reprint it in the Spring 2018 edition of his magazine.  The issue is now out, and my piece is on the Utne Reader website too, so if you weren’t able to read it before, you can find it here.

    I recently wrote another Brian Doyle-related piece, this one about a theater director turning his beloved novel Mink River into a play.  It includes a chronicle of how Brian came to write the book.  It will go up on Oregon Arts Watch sometime in the next two weeks.

  • Podcast Interview: Talking about Memoir, Biography and the Craft of Nonfiction

    A few weeks ago, I stopped by Jennifer Lauck’s Blackbird Studio to talk to her class about memoir, biography and writing in general.  She recorded the session and it’s available free on her website.  Have a listen.

    Jennifer is the author of the bestselling memoir Blackbird and three other books.  You’ll find more about her and her books on her Amazon author’s page.

    If you live in the Portland area, check out Jennifer’s classes for writers.

  • A Writing Residency in China This Fall

    A Writing Residency in China This Fall

    In March, after my talk on the ethics of biography at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida, a Chinese writer named Dai Fan, who directs the creative writing program at Sun-Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China, came up to me and invited to be part of a writing residency there this fall.  It’s taken a while for the paperwork to be done but I can announce now that I will be joining writers from seven other countries for four weeks of writing, lectures and readings this October and November.

    We’ll have two weeks free for writing in the beautiful autonomous region of Guilin (pictured here), a week of talks and readings in Guangzhou, and a final week of writing in the cultural capital of Meizhou.

    I’ll give more details, including the names of the other writers and the countries they’re from, in a future post.

    The creative writing program at Sun Yat-sen University is the only one of its kind in English in China.  Students from the program will be our interpreters while we’re there.  I anticipate many interesting conversations with them, as well as the other writers and the program faculty.

  • I’ll Be Leading a Nonfiction Workshop for the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week, June 18-22

    I’ll Be Leading a Nonfiction Workshop for the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week, June 18-22

    If you’re looking for a summer writing program to attend, you can’t do better than the Manhattanville College MFA’s Summer Writers’ Week.  For just $650 ($750 after March 31), you get an all-morning workshop each day with a small group of fellow writers, afternoon craft presentations in all genres, and evening readings and other events.  Housing for the week is just $40/night–and Manhattanville College is only a half hour away by train or car from New York City.  (All workshop and events take place in the most beautiful rooms you’ll find at any writers’ week anywhere.)

    Bestselling fiction writer and memoirist Dani Shapiro will be the week’s keynote speaker and lead the fiction workshop.

    Poet Melissa Tuckey, a co-founder of Split This Rock, will lead the poetry workshop.

    Screenwriter Sharbari Ahmed will lead the dramatic writing workshop.

    And I’ll lead the nonfiction workshop.

    Click here for full details and registration information.

  • An Ethical Starter Kit for Writing About People

    An Ethical Starter Kit for Writing About People

    When you write about other people, you make ethical decisions from beginning to end.  Here’s a starter kit for making those decisions, in the form of questions to ask at each step along the way:

    1. Choosing a subject: Why does this subject appeal to you? Is it someone you can approach fairly and open-mindedly? Do you have a bias already for or against the subject?  If you know the person, are you able to get enough distance from her to go beyond your own preconceived notions of her?  Are you able to be objective even if you find information that counters or even destroys your image of the person?  Are you willing to disclose your bias for or against in some way to your reader?
    1. Collecting facts: Do you have access to enough material to feel comfortable creating an image of your subject for an audience? If not, how might you mitigate this problem by the use of other contextual material? Do you have enough time and other resources (money, ability to travel to archives, contacts, etc.) to do a thorough job?  Are you open to whatever material you find?  Are you willing to keep researching, especially interviewing, even when your interest in your subject has flagged?  What are you willing to do to secure potentially important material in the hands of someone skeptical of your project?
    1. Interviewing: How will you select those you interview about your subject? How thorough are you willing to be? Will you include people who might have a view of that person different than yours?  What are you willing to do to convince skeptical interviewees to talk to you?  How far are you willing to go with flattery or intimations of friendship?  Can you be honest with interviewees about your views of your subject?  Are you willing to prepare thoroughly for all interviews?  How will you differentiate between interview material that comes from someone you like or agree with vs. someone you don’t like or whose opinion might conflict with yours?
    1. Gaps: How will you deal with the inevitable gaps in the story you find? Are you willing to delay moving to publication to try to find more material? Will you disclose them to your reader or try to elide them?  Are you willing to be more provisional in your writing or do you feel the need to write with total conviction?  How comfortable are you with using your imagination to fill some gaps?  How do you decide when you have truly made a good-faith effort to fill gaps?  Are you willing to abandon the project if you encounter too many gaps?
    1. Choosing themes: How will you ensure that the themes you choose are truly demonstrable from your subject’s life? If you have a theme in mind when you start, are you flexible enough to let it go or even have it upended? How will you deal with material that doesn’t fit neatly into your themes or even counters them?  How will you make sure your themes aren’t too restrictive or prescriptive?  How will you determine whether your themes are fair and not the result of trendy ideas or what you think will sell?
    1. Creating a narrative: Are you able to establish and sustain a narrative that is capacious enough to encompass all of your research? How will you deal with material that doesn’t fit neatly into story form or the sequence of stories you want to tell? How can you ensure that the pictures you create on the page comes from facts only and don’t distort the subject’s viewpoint or experience if they come from sources outside his life?  How will you use stories or juicy material that comes from a single source, particularly if that source is questionable?  How will you convey to your reader what sources you’ve used to construct your narrative (in-text clues, endnotes, bibliography, etc.)?
    1. Making claims: How can you keep potentially controversial claims from being libelous? Is everything you claim about your subject based on thorough research? How will you decided what to do with material that might seem an invasion of privacy but seems important to the claims you’re making about your subject?  Are you willing to be less-definitive in your claims to indicate to your reader that the claims are provisional or based on thin evidence?  Have you had enough people of different viewpoints read your work to be sure your claims are broadly valid?  Are your claims based on more than a single source?  Are you able to get outside your own social and cultural context and evaluate your claims from a different viewpoint?
    1. Fact checking: Have you asked those with knowledge of particular facts to read them in the context of your work? Have you had enough people read your manuscript to catch errors you might have stopped seeing? Have you checked out questionable “facts” with other sources?  Have you been honest in evaluating your sources?   Have you double-checked later versions of your manuscript against original sources?  Have you been thorough in matching what interviewees tell you against all possible written sources (letters, diaries, official documents, published works, etc.)?
    1. Revision and editing: Have you made sure you haven’t introduced errors by taking things out or adding things in? In making your writing more concise or trying to fit a word count, have you been careful not to be reductive or create an unintended connection through juxtapositioning? Have you been careful not to introduce gaps that weren’t there before?  Have you absolutely, thoroughly and repeatedly checked and rechecked every name, place and other type of information that identifies any individual?  Have you checked the work of editors and proofreaders yourself?
    1. Publication: Have you thought about the effects of publication on your subject and yourself? How will you deal with the inevitable errors others will find in the published work? What responsibility do you have to the work after it’s out in the world?  How will you deal with information that comes to you after the book or article is published?  Will your writing about your subject end with publication or will you continue to write, speak and blog about her?  How will you deal with the inevitable critics of your work—your researching, your interpretations, your claims, your writing or your integrity?

    Again, this list is meant only to get you thinking about the many ethical decisions you’ll have to make along the way, with the hope that you’ll make them consciously and well.

    © Michael N. McGregor 2018