Memoir, redefined

The British press, which often is well ahead of the curve on things like this, is agog that Sarah Palin’s memoir is due out next Spring, a stunning $7 million having been handed over by HarperCollins for the privilege. It will appear at roughly the same time as George W. Bush’s volume about his ‘decisions’. [...]

Funeral Games

Just round the corner from my house are several funeral homes, and sometimes when I’m headed to the Armenian grocery for some fresh basil I run into small knots of mourners, chatting and having a smoke. What strikes me very often is that the women are sometimes dressed in attire that one might more usually [...]

Memoir and Memory

Working with one of my memoir writers recently we found she was having trouble with the chronology of her life story, and she began to bemoan the loss of her diaries. She had, she said, destroyed several of her diaries in a fit of boredom. She’d looked at them, declared there was nothing [...]

Sex and the City and Cinderella

This link will take you directly to the YouTube conversation about Cinderella:
Allan on YouTube

The Art of Slowing Down

Today started in typical Monday style - all sorts of things needing to be done, some of which were rather time-consuming. I found myself wrestling with getting the video interviews onto my website, unsuccessfully. They are on Youtube, on Facebook, but not - as yet - on my website. Clearly this called for more [...]

Youtube and Me, part II

Archetypes and literature, and how they work - as explained by me in person.
Here are some more interviews of me by Lilou Mace, for those who are interested. Lilou herself is a very interesting person, as you’ll see if you cut and paste the links below, which take you to her ‘channel’ on [...]

YouTube and Me

I was hoping to be able to have a link directly to the Youtube interviews right here on this page, but the link is a little more complicated than I’d expected. It should be up in a couple of days. Still, if you’re curious about Princes and frogs, or about Cinderella as she truly [...]

What’s in a word?

Browsing the news the other day I heard that the US Navy had deployed some destroyers to the Straits of Hormuz. This got me thinking of the word ‘destroyer’. Possibly it was because I’d been reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s wonderful novel Ceremony, in which she characterizes the white settlers who drove the Indians [...]

Be Famous! A simple how-to Guide to being Newsworthy

How to become newsworthy; five easy steps
So many ridiculous things become news, and so many worthy things become news for merely a few seconds before being forgotten, that I’ve devised a whole series of hints for all you aspiring celebrities so that you can become a news feature that will catapult you to instantaneous fame.
First: [...]

Bay Path, the Bookies, and me

The Bookies gathered at Bay Path (as I told you they would…) and were a delight to all who met them, as well as each other.
The event was the brainchild of Suzanne Strempek Shea, Bay Path’s extraordinary writer-in-residence, and Briana Sitler, the presiding genius of all things that need to be done with style and [...]