Why write memoir as fiction?

I am often asked why I chose to write “A Dangerous Daughter” as fiction rather than as a memoir. These words by Jayne Tuttle, from Lee Kofman’s blog for writers, perfectly express my own feelings about why I chose to write two books based on truth as fiction not fact, not even creative non-fiction. From “The Ecstatic Truth in Creative Non-fiction:A Guest Post by Jayne Tuttle” published in Lee Kofman’s Blog for Writers: “My books are based around significant episodes in my life, but I am less interested in that than the sensations and ideas and questions they raise. So I take the true story, and try to tell it in as juste a way as I can. Meaning, I aim to communicate the feeling of this experience to my reader, not just recount the list of events. To do this, I shrink timelines, invent dialogue, play with detail and tone … I try to reconstruct the actual experience in as creative a way as I can, to fit the compact form of a book. A factual account would be a thousand pages, boring and indulgent.” — Read on leekofman.com.au/the-writer-laid-bare/the-ecstatic-truth-in-creative-nonfiction-a-guest-post-by-jayne-tuttle/

Read More →

Assia the Artist

Few people know that Assia Gutmann Wevill was an accomplished artist in her own right. She painted brightly coloured miniatures of birds, fish, and flowers, and gave them to friends. She also drew the illustrations for many of Ted Hughes’s works. Sadly these have not survived As well as her talents in the visual arts, Assia was a gifted translator. […]

Read More →