Michael N. McGregor

Latest Posts

  • 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

  • Wisdom’s Cry #4: Getting to Silence

    Wisdom’s Cry #4: Getting to Silence

    This one might be a bit overwritten, but it still holds true–maybe even truer than ever in our internet, smart phone, and 24-hour-news world:

    Getting to Silence

    (August 1992)

    For a day, maybe two, at the end of my summer tours — three-week marathons of exposure to and care for other people — I feel a sense of panic, as though the earth has been pulled out from beneath my feet and I am suddenly falling down to the depths of an unvoiced despair — without support, without recourse, without even a self to rely upon.

    For a day, maybe two, I want nothing but to be back with the people I so recently wanted to leave behind, the people who have surrounded me night and day for three weeks, who have worn me down with their needs, their wants, their insistent demands.  I feel a need for them, a desperate need, as though I will expire if I’m not wrapped in their cares, their words, their presence.

    For a day, maybe two, there is one person with whom I don’t want to be left alone, one person who makes me feel as though I’m nothing despite the favorable evaluations, the thank-yous, the words of praise.  He says nothing but he is there, waiting–in my room, on the street, in the little cafe where I go for a rest and a cafe au lait.  He promises nothing, threatens nothing, asks for nothing but my presence alone with him.  Yet I am filled with fear of him, with fear of the unknown, for he is myself.

    On the third or fourth day, if I have resisted the panic-driven urge to surround myself with other people, my fear recedes.  If I have kept to myself, weathered the fear, the feeling of uselessness, the lack of hope, on the third or maybe the fourth day I rise again from the grave of despair and I am a changed man.  I have entered a new reality, a new world, a world in which my self comes to me as the perfect companion — both pupil and teacher, playmate and partner, parent and child.

    There is a still, small voice in each of us that fills us with more fear than the winds and storm with which we surround ourselves.  We want more of ‘life’ — whatever ‘life’ might be — and so we try to reach out farther, to push ourselves faster, to consume more and more, all the time trying to silence this voice inside that is telling us we are lost int he void of the universe.  It whispers so softly that we think we can ignore it and the import of its words but they echo loudly through the empty spaces of our souls, reverberating through the chambers of our hearts, telling us over and over again that in our search for something more we have found less, we have stretched ourselves so fine that we are about to break, spread ourselves so wide that there is no center left.  No center, just a still, small voice of which we are afraid.

    Then something happens.  We have an accident that keeps us from working.  Or we hear that a relative or good friend has died.  Or one day our mind or heart gives out and we enter a period in which nothing matters at all.  And because we no longer desire those things we desired, wee no longer fear those things we feared — including the still, small voice.  And yet we go on ignoring it until every other voice has been stripped away, until we are left alone with hits whispers, its echoes, its words.  The panic comes anew.  Our impulse is to run and find someone, anyone, to be with, but we are tired of the world, tired of its ways and everyone who goes about them.  So we sit with the voice, like two people who suddenly find themselves alone together on a park bench.  The voice asks a question and despite ourselves we answer.  The question is about us and in the timbre of the voice we sense a sincere desire to know, a desire we suddenly realize has been missing from every other voice we’ve heard for…how long?

    The voice both probes and reassures; it lets us know how little we really know ourselves and at the same time makes us believe that we can know ourselves, that there is still time.  It begins to pull out of us thoughts and feelings and dreams that amaze us for we never realized they were there.  We are frightened of them at first — they seem unreal, like phantoms that have risen from the murky earth to mock us — but the voice assures us that they are real and comely and speak the truth.  They want us to know them because they are part of us, they are us, and we see for the first time that we have always thought that the thoughts we were thinking and the feelings we were feeling — thoughts and feelings given to us by others — were ours.  And dreams — why, we didn’t even realize that we had dreams.  And suddenly we feel a wriggle of excitement, a sense that we have at last found a clue to what ‘life’ is all about.  The solitude we once feared we now crave.  We seek silence, for only when the noisy ways of the world have been filtered out can we hear what the voice is telling us.

    Life presents a dilemma then, for we must work to make a living and yet we no longer have the same desires, the same wants and needs of those around us.  In fact, when we re-enter their world it all seems a bit silly and wrong-headed.  We crave silence, but after a few weeks away from it we find that we fear it again, too.  We must pull away and live with the fear of ourselves again for a day, maybe two.  We must die again tot he world, knowing that on the third day, or maybe the fourth, we will rise to a new reality, a new world — the world of our true thoughts and feelings and dreams.  The world of that still, small voice that tells us who we really are and what ‘life’ — our life — is all about.

    © Michael N. McGregor 1992

  • Looking for a New Read?

    For some reason, a number of people I’ve worked with in the graduate program at Portland State University or my summer coaching at the Collegeville Institute have new books coming out right now.  Here’s a list for you to choose from.  All of these people are terrific writers or, in the case of David Naimon, a terrific interviewer AND writer:

    *February 26: Crash Course by Julie Whipple, Yamhill Canyon Press–“The true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know.”

    *March 6: The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir by Apricot Irving, Simon & Schuster–“Award-winning writer Apricot Irving recounts her childhood as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti during a time of upheaval—both in the country and in her home.”

    *April 3: Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon, Tin House Books–“In a series of conversations with Between The Covers’s David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry―both her process and her philosophy.”

    +April 10: Tree Dreams by Kristin Kaye, SparkPress–“An eco-literary, coming of age novel relevant for teenagers and adults alike.”

    +April 10: The Shadow of Death: A Sister Agatha and Father Selwyn Mystery by Jane Willan, Crooked Lane Books–“A charming and clever traditional mystery debut set at a bucolic Welsh convent.”

    May 8: God, Improv and the Art of Living by MaryAnn McKibben Dana, Eerdman’s–“The central principle of “yes, and . . .” in improvisational theater has produced a lot of great comedy. But it also offers an invigo­rating approach to life in general, and the spiritual life in particular.”

    And here’s one more–not by someone I’ve worked with but by a marvelous naturalist/biologist and friend:

    +January 29: Everyday Creatures: A Naturalist on the Surprising Beauty of Ordinary Life in Wild Places by George James Kenagy, Dockside Sailing Press–“A collection of thirteen simply and elegantly told nature stories, set in time over the course of a naturalist’s lifetime.”

     

    *first book

    +first book in this genre