Reflections on Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, (Auto)Biography, Life-Writing, and the Essay
Almost four years ago, I got a phone call telling me that I’d been accepted into the Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism Program. Thrilled by the news, I immediately went to the library (as I do at most major crossroads in my life) to do some research. I took out whatever I could find of Joan [...]
23 Apr 2010 at 07:13
Julija Šukys
Anthropology, Journeys, Life-blood, Piers Vitebsky, Russia, Siberia
Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. Houghton Mifflin, [2005] 2006. When I told my aunt that I wanted to go to Siberia to find the village where my grandmother (her mother) was exiled for seventeen years, her immediate reaction was: “you can’t do that! you can’t go there!” Since [...]
A big theme in my work is multilingualism. I’m interested in how people live in several tongues simultaneously: authors who speak one language in daily life, but write in another; families who embrace members from all over the world; and how kids navigate polyglot waters. In large part my interest is biographical: I grew up [...]
I published my first book with a university press. The process was long, slow, and often arduous. Would I do it again? Absolutely. University presses take a long view of writing: the books they publish contribute to knowledge, build on tradition, and rely on the checks and balances of a community of thinkers, writers and [...]
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 [...]
Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. Harper Collins, 1995. I wish I’d read The Blue Jay’s Dance a year and a half ago, when I was trying to rebuild my writerly self eighteen months after the birth of my son. In a flurry of frustration and aloneness, I read everything I could [...]
08 Apr 2010 at 11:48
Julija Šukys
Biography, Life-writing, Lithuania, Ona Šimaitė, Research, Vilnius
Today I came across a blog post by the archivist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives, where some of Ona Šimaitė’s papers are held. Šimaitė, of course, is the subject of my second book manuscript, Beloved Profession, whose impending publication I hope to announce very soon. I sat with the Hoover Institution’s Šimaitė collection for [...]
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 [...]
