Reflections on Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, (Auto)Biography, Life-Writing, and the Essay
19 Jan 2012 at 04:22
Julija Šukys
Academia, Algeria, Archives, Biography, Catholicism, Children, Christianity, Countdown to Publication, Creative Nonfiction, Domesticity, Eastern Europe, Editing, Epistolophilia, Grad School, Journeys, Libraries, Lithuania, Mothering, Ona Šimaitė, Paris, Research, Residencies and Fellowships, Russia, Saints, SheWrites, Siberia, Silence is Death, Tahar Djaout, Uncategorized, Writing
This is Who-Man. My son and I invented him over breakfast this morning. Who-Man is a superhero whose arch-enemy is a many-eyed monster called “Crime.” Who-Man wears a bumpy suit (as you can see in Sebastian’s rendition of him above). The suit can shoot fire, but our hero rarely has to use this weapon. He [...]
My thanks to Mouloud Belabdi, who writes beautifully on his blog, “Chroniques de Montréal,” about the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout, assassinated in 1993. Djaout was the subject of my first book, Silence is Death. How pleased I was to read Belabdi’s description of my book: Son livre est une méditation constante sur la mort, la [...]
15 Apr 2010 at 13:24
Julija Šukys
Life-writing, Ona Šimaitė, Research, Silence is Death, Tahar Djaout
“How many times has someone said that writings of a particular woman had no value because they were merely about daily events?” — Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself. The term “life-writing” designates private texts not written for publication, primarily letters and diaries. It can tell us a lot about the past, how people [...]
06 Apr 2010 at 17:19
Julija Šukys
Autobiography, Biography, Life-writing, Mothering, Multiple Sclerosis, Ona Šimaitė, Tahar Djaout, Writing
My father died very suddenly when I was eighteen years old. Shortly after his funeral, my mother dreamed he came back to life. She couldn’t explain how; he was just back. The weird thing was that the dream seemed largely to be about the bureaucracy of death. My parents sat on the couch for a [...]
26 Mar 2010 at 08:56
Julija Šukys
Algeria, Biography, Journeys, Research, Silence is Death, Tahar Djaout
I recently came across an article referring to my book, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, in El Watan, a major Algerian newspaper. The piece’s author, Benhouna Bensadat Mustapha, writes about the Algerian national hero, Emir Abdelkader (or Abd El Kader), the Iowa town of Elkader that was named for him, [...]
08 Mar 2010 at 09:56
Julija Šukys
Autobiography, Beloved Profession, Biography, Creative Nonfiction, Eastern Europe, Language and Multilingualism, Letters, Life-writing, Lithuania, Ona Šimaitė, Research, Russia, Siberia, Silence is Death, Tahar Djaout, Vilna Ghetto, Writing
For a long time I resisted calling myself a biographer. I didn’t mean to write these kinds of stories, or those kinds of books. But, like all the best things in life (cats, love) — biography chose me. Despite myself, and despite having been trained as a literary scholar at a time when the author [...]
