Cynthia Harrison

Novelist

Year: 2012

  • Discovering Theme

    Alice Munro has a new book of stories out. In Dear Life, the final four stories are as close to memoir, she says, that she’ll ever write. I was disappointed when a reviewer mentioned that the quartet takes place when Munro was a young girl growing up on a fox farm in Ontario, Canada. She’s…

  • The Plan

    For about a month now, I have been working every day on a non-fiction project with a good friend. Yes, I am collaborating. Something I thought I’d never, ever do. But it is going well and I’m glad to be attached to this particular project for a variety of reasons dear to my heart. Too…

  • Where Truth Meets Fiction

    I wrote the memoir. It was a short piece for an anthology that doesn’t pay much, so just this morning, I decided not to send it. I don’t need the publication credit, and I don’t want it out there. It might hurt my husband or it might not, but he’s not the only one I’m thinking…

  • More on Memoir

    My friends have been emailing and texting about yesterday’s post. This wanting to write but feeling like we shouldn’t is common. Sometimes writers wait until everyone who will not like the memoir dies, and then they write it. Mark Twain locked up his letters for 100 years, just to be on the safe side:) I did…

  • Thinking Memoir?

    In September, DWW member Virginia Parker taught a memoir workshop. I sat in on her session and she hit on a hard question that comes up for me over and over again. What if the truth you write damages relationships with loved ones? Does writing matter more than the relationship(s)? If so, go ahead, but be aware, there…