The Ready Writer

2017 was a...rough year.  BUT there were a lot of good stories to come from it, so in no particular order, here were my favorite stories of 2017.  We'll start with the Podcasts: I know I've mentioned this podcast before , but it remains one of the best stories I've ever listened to. It made me laugh, cry, and just generally FEEL (which was hard to do in the numbing shock that was 2017). Even though this is nonfiction, it still influences me and helps me to think about the ways in which to tell a good story.  Told in a similar way as S-Town, Dirty John is an episodic (but limited) nonfiction podcast.  It is about love, deception, forgiveness, denial, and pretty much every other feeling you could feel. You can listen to the destruction that John Michael Meehan causes as the podcast or you can read about him on the LA Times website .  The podcast isn't quite as...lyrical? Poetic? as S-Town, but it's content will make you want to binge it. You...

I've been thinking a lot lately about creative nonfiction - and that's probably due to the fact that for the first time in 7(?) years, I have been inspired by people.  Real life people. I took my first creative nonfiction class in community college because it was a term I had never heard before.  How on Earth could an essay be creative? But it opened up this new world to me, a world of memoir and a level of thought that I needed and ended up thriving on. the first creative essay I wrote landed me a spot reading in a swanky art gallery surrounded by middle aged, well dressed academics drinking wine (which was, and still is my measurement of success). I continued taking creative nonfiction as a writing major at Southern Oregon University. I got A;s, I was told I could easily be a biographer or a memoirist, or essayist writing for any number of journals, and yet, for some reason, I stopped. I attended Grad School where I studied Library Science, not just because I wanted to b...