Blog : Articles
Climbing the High Ridges and Stumbling
| July 1, 2015 I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, I’ve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I don’t teach writing or literature at any college or university, so maybe you’d just as soon stop reading right here. After all, I’m hardly a professional book reviewer. But because I’m a professional educator, an environmental educator, I do know this: it all comes down to creating an authentic experience.
Podcast Interview with Michael Graff
| June 17, 2015 Female skydivers, street races, and more in this edition of Gangrey the Podcast. Matt Tullis talks with Michael Graff, the editor of Charlotte Magazine and freelance writer for SB Nation Longform, Washingtonian Magazine, and Politico.
Turning the Tables: How One Woman Put Food in Its Place
| June 10, 2015 Andie Mitchell is a “foodie.” She is a serious, hard-core “foodie,” a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.
Podcast Interview with Mike Wilson
| June 8, 2015 Mike Wilson is finishing up his first few months as the new editor of the Dallas Morning News. He's also worked as an editor for ESPN and the St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay Times, fostering talented writers and reporters like Ben Montgomery, Michale Kruse, Kelley Benham French, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lane GeGregory.
Why We're Here: River Teeth Nonfiction Conference 2015
| May 21, 2015 One week out from the River Teeth conference, conference director Sarah M. Wells reflects on why we gather for writers' conferences.
Podcast Interview with Brooke Jarvis
| May 20, 2015 Matt Tullis interviews Brooke Jarvis, longform narrative and environmental journalist. Jarvis discusses recent stories about the oil industry in Ecuador and deep sea mining.
It's About Time
| May 5, 2015 On the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didn’t want to lose anything. So she wrote—800,000 words over twenty-five years. But you won’t see a word from those diaries in Ongoingness, The End of a Diary...
Where Have All the Overmedicated Mermaids Gone?
| April 6, 2015 Elissa Washuta’s memoir is a twisting, chameleon-like work of reportage, highly poetic at times, showing how cultural forces and tragic events have left their tracks on her body and mind. The search “for an identity to sink into” in a savage, selfish world is at the heart of this book.
Podcast Interview with Brandon Sneed
| March 19, 2015 Brandon Sneed wrote the book "Behind the Drive: A Story of Passion, Dreams, Demons, and Highway 55, the World's Next Favorite Burger Joint."
A Son Coming Home
| March 1, 2015 Steven Harvey, in his marvelous memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, is on a journey to discover and understand his mother who committed suicide in April, 1961, when Harvey was eleven years old. Reflecting on her act, Harvey observes that it “had exploded in my life like the flash of a camera at close range, darkening everything around me and casting me into blindness, and when the light returned she was gone. . . . "
Editor's Notes, Volume 16, Number 2
February 26, 2015 The title character of Heckert’s piece—flinty, cantankerous, desperately ill—simply refuses to do what we expect of her, either as a literary character or as a real person. And, as River Teeth readers know, it is the knife’s edge between those worlds that endlessly worries and fascinates us.
Keywords: 16-2, editors notes
Which Way Next?
| February 1, 2015 In his brief essay, “Dead Weight,” Eric Freeze describes a walk he takes with his dog, Zeke, a walk that ends horribly. He sees a police cruiser descending a hill, his Dalmatian blundering into its path, and there’s nothing he can do but shout and witness the inevitable. This scene reveals a tension that runs through many of the fifteen essays in his first collection of essays, Hemingway on a Bike: the threat of lurking disaster in the most peaceful of moments versus the potential in such moments for sudden and wonderful insight.
Podcast Interview with David Giffels
| January 28, 2015 In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with David Giffels, former newspaper reporter and author of the book, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt.
A Beautiful Savage Game
| January 7, 2015 After forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland Raiders’ loss, Almond no longer indulges his love of watching football and his latest book, Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, explains why.
The Infinitely Unending Art of Judith Kitchen
| December 1, 2014 Judith Kitchen, writer, editor, critic, and teacher, died at the age of 73 on November 6, 2014, after living with metastasized breast cancer, the subject of The Circus Train. I choose the word “living” deliberately because Kitchen’s presence—her aliveness on the page—is a swirling force behind many memorable passages in the book...
Podcast Interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis
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| November 19, 2014 In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Vanessa Grigoriadis, an award winning contributor for national magazines. She talks about pop culture, journalistic research and some of her recent articles.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Women Authors
| November 3, 2014 Since its inception, Shebooks’ digital collection of downloadable fiction, memoir, and journalism has grown to over 70 books, each of which the publishers say can be read “in an hour or two.” Their library is composed of works by both new and established writers. We review three selections in this month's book review.
Podcast Interview with Earl Swift
| October 27, 2014 In this episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Earl Swift, the author of Auto Biography: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream. The book tells the life story of a 1957 Chevy that, at the beginning of the book, is falling apart.
To the Body Born
| October 1, 2014 “I started my martial arts training on the day the Gulf War began,” Peggy Shinner recalls. It was a discipline she would go on to master and teach. Moving across the page in her essay collection, You Feel So Mortal, with the same agility she took to the polished wood of the dojo floor, Shinner explores the flesh and blood experience—hers and ours—of having a body.
Podcast Interview with Eli Saslow
| September 11, 2014 Eli Saslow is a reporter at the Washington Post. Earlier this year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his series of stories on food stamps in a post-recession America.
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is
| September 3, 2014 In Praise of Nothing is both an interesting and a frustrating book. It’s interesting in its attempt to write a postmodern memoir. It’s frustrating, however, because it does not fulfill the reader’s conventional expectations of coherence and meaning. Postmodern thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, are highly skeptical of the idea of human agency and would also doubt the coherence of the self. They believe the idea that a human being who is a psychologically whole and stable person is largely fictionalized. Therefore, LeMay has written an unstable memoir.
Editor's Notes, Volume 16, Number 1
| August 28, 2014 We at River Teeth talk a lot about what the journal has meant to us during our first fifteen years. What we’ve discovered doesn’t surprise us now, but it would have fifteen years ago. It’s the people: the people we’ve met, the people we’ve published, the people who came of age as creative nonfiction writers reading River Teeth. It’s all pretty damn humbling, to be sure.
Essaying a Spinning World
| August 1, 2014 Much of what Skloot deems "off-kilter" seems the kind of emotional imbalance with which we can all identify.
The Inner World of Caregiving
| July 1, 2014 If caregiving was a compass and sainthood was at zero degrees north, The Fifth Season would orient us due south.
Going Long, It's Tense, Research, Getting Connected, Reflection, Naming and more from #RTNC2014
June 27, 2014 Snippets, snapshots, and video from the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference
Growing the Soil and the Soul: On Richard Gilbert's SHEPHERD
| June 1, 2014 Sometimes a memoir, spilling into the ken of autobiography, must grapple with an author’s lifelong enigma—his book’s story, the story. As we read, we feel this cyclonic summing-up, the best chance after the life (or as far as the life has got) to say what, in particular, shaped that life’s core meaning. Perhaps the revelation is that we don’t get another go-round (obvious but important), that we never knew the storm was gathering while it happened (as much good as bad), and that the life we thought we lived was not exactly the one we did live (the new self the memoir discloses to its surprised narrator). Such is the case with Richard Gilbert’s book, Shepherd.
Why We're Here: Third Annual River Teeth Nonfiction Conference
| May 22, 2014 For as intimate and vulnerable as the writing process is, the process of sending my work out into the world for possible publication feels like the most distant and impersonal interaction there is between writer and reader. And yet, what is publishing our words except engaging in a broader conversation, contributing one voice to a river of voices?
Podcast Interview with Jackie Valley
| April 24, 2014 Jackie Valley is a reporter at the Las Vegas Sun. Just about one year ago, she published a seven-part series called “Grace Through Grief.” The series followed Arturo Martinez and his two young sons as they dealt with the brutal murder of their wife and daughter, their mother and sister.
Podcast Interview with Eva Holland
| April 17, 2014 Eva Holland's story "Chasing Alexander Supertramp" looks at the increasing number of people who make the pilgrimage to the bus where Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild Fame died. The hike to that bus includes a dangerous crossing of the Teklanika River in Alaska, and continues to strand hikers on a regular basis, and sometimes claim lives.
Podcast Interview with Ben Montgomery
| April 9, 2014 In this podcast, Matt Tullis talks with Ben Montgomery, enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times and the author of Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.
Keywords: ben montgomery, gangrey, interview, literary journalism, matt tullis, podcast |
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