Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 23

How Do Writers Eclipse the Real?

I’m thinking today of the eclipse of the sun that happened in August 2017. My husband and I had just spent three nights on the Mendocino coast in Northern California and were driving to our Bay Area home under an overcast sky. We didn’t see the whole eclipse, but we did notice a change in […]

The post How Do Writers Eclipse the Real? appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

What if a writer isn’t fully committed to his/her work

I recall when I was making what I hoped would be my last proofreading of the manuscript for Curva Peligrosa. I’d lost track of how many times I’d made this journey through the novel, trying to track down any typos, spelling, or punctuation errors. And each time, I seemed to find a few, making me […]

The post What if  a writer isn’t fully committed to his/her work appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

What’s the future for auto fiction?

Recently, my reading group selected Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit as our next book, and I recalled reading a review by Elaine Blair of Cusk’s novel Outline in the January 2015 New Yorker. Blair claims “Cusk has written admiringly about Karl Ove Knausgaard, and her proposed cure for the trouble with fiction sounds like a gloss of his. ‘Autobiography is […]

The post What’s the future for auto fiction? appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

What is the REAL story (Part 2)?

Please read last week’s post first. It’s a lead in to this one. Just as poets do, fiction writers have a rich, multiply textured tradition to draw from that includes more than the conventional narrative, and I haven’t even mentioned the fabulists and those writing metafictions. In an article in The New York Review of […]

The post What is the REAL story (Part 2)? appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

What is the real story (part 1)?

“The artist must be deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need and harken to its words alone.”  —Kandinsky. Several years ago, I entered a master’s in creative writing program as a poet, but I was equally interested in writing fiction and […]

The post What is the real story (part 1)? appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

Here’s a sample of author Joseph Carrabis wonderful wit that comes through in my interview with him: Where do your characters come from? Toledo. I have an apartment building there and rent out rooms to them. They come, stay a while, then move on. It’s a g

Joseph Carrabis Bio Joseph Carrabis has been everything from a long-haul trucker to a Chief Research Scientist. He’s taught internationally at the university level, holds patents in a base, disruptive technology, created a company that grew from his basement to offices in four countries, helped companies varying in size from mom&pops for F500s develop their […]

The post Here’s a sample of author Joseph Carrabis wonderful wit that comes through in my interview with him: Where do your characters come from? Toledo. I have an apartment building there and rent out rooms to them. They come, stay a while, then move on. It’s a good deal because the rent’s cheap and I change their names before writing them into stories. appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

Words as animals

I recently read the book Words as Eggs by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart. The idea for the work, and the chapter from which the title comes, originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams. A voice in his dream said, “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” (92). […]

The post Words as animals appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

Words as placeholders!

The pandemic has prevented us from traveling much beyond where we live, so my husband and I spent time last evening viewing photos from a recent trip to France. While I was there, I recall thinking about how limited words are in capturing the essence of a person, place, or thing. They are temporary placeholders, […]

The post Words as placeholders! appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

Remaking Ourselves Through Writing Memoir

My last memoir workshop at the Fromm Institute will be this Tuesday, and I’ll be sorry to leave the cocoon we’ve created there on Zoom. For those who aren’t familiar with the Fromm, it’s an institution for older adults and features lectures from outstanding Bay Area emeritus professors on a variety of subjects that include […]

The post Remaking Ourselves Through Writing Memoir appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.

Thanks to Brian Doyle and Orion Magazine for The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

THE GREATEST NATURE ESSAY EVER WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down, tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, […]

The post Thanks to Brian Doyle and Orion Magazine for The Greatest Nature Essay Ever appeared first on WELCOME TO MY BLOG, FELLOW WRITERS AND READERS!.