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Master Class: The Vivid Nature of Annie Dillard
Published in 1974, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek chronicles Annie Dillard’s rambles near her home in rural Virginia. The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction. And Edward Abbey labeled Dillard as Thoreau’s “true heir.” Pilgrim is a giant in the “humans encounter nature” genre. Structured in four sections, one for each season, there
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The Wanting Was a Wilderness
When I first became interested in writing a trail-based memoir, I went looking for some sort of critical analysis of Wild, the iconic book in the genre. What I found was Alden Jones’ The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir. Jones’ book is a singular mixture of criticism, how-to,
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The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr is the bestselling author of the 1995 memoir The Liar’s Club. She’s also published five volumes of poetry and is a professor of English Literature at Syracuse University, where her students have included Cheryl Strayed. With those credentials you might expect a highfalutin literary voice in her book on memoir, but far from
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Becoming Odyssa
Jennifer Pharr Davis has a long outdoor resume including thru hikes on virtually every continent, the Women’s Fastest Known Time on the Appalachian Trail in 2008, then the Overall FKT on the AT in 2011. Becoming Odyssa is the story of her first adventure, hiking the AT in 2005, and how she became who she
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A Short Course in Storytelling
My background is in technical writing with years of documenting software during my career, then blogging about personal finance during retirement. When I set out to write my memoir, I knew I could construct sentences efficiently, recount events precisely, and describe scenery accurately. But, after receiving my first critiques from experienced memoirists and novelists, I
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The Trail Memoir Genre
Trail memoir is a subset of adventure travel memoir. Walking and reflecting are its essence. For our purposes here, trail memoir is the recounting of a long hike, on an easily identifiable route, often in wilderness, told in first person by the one that walked it. I’m going to resist for now including other self-powered
Trail Memoir 