by Paula Whyman
When I was younger and my friends came to visit, my mother would say, “Include your sister,” but Donna didn’t wait for an invitation. She followed me from room to room, a ghost in white tennis socks with pink puff balls at the heels and a nightgown she wore all day if she didn’t go out. Continue reading
“I’d always felt frustrated by books that made things simpler than I’d found them to be. Even writing English papers as a college student, you’re supposed to sound like you know what you’re talking about. But so often I didn’t–I didn’t even know what I meant. But I knew that. So I began to explore language that expressed the groping way I thought, mixing uncertainty and mistakes with bursts of insight. I found that this was the way to just sound human.” Continue reading
“The question is, how do we honor the sacrifice without glorifying war itself? It’s a major issue for all of us, and one I felt keenly as Cartographer grew into the novel it became.” Continue reading
“I read somewhere that most people’s favorite teacher is a high school English teacher. That doesn’t mean that English teachers are better than other teachers. It means that rather than talk about amoebas or equations, we talk about feelings – Holden Caulfield’s, Hamlet’s, Hedda Gabler’s – and teenagers are full of feelings, so we’re right up their alley. Teaching literature is like shooting fish in a barrel and damned near solipsistic; every great book is, after all, about me.” Continue reading
The way I tried to balance the fictional and real was to write a totally fictional story, starting with the death of the great cellist, involving characters who did not exist and events that never happened which, nonetheless, allowed me to describe the emotional realities of growing up in a world of classical music, with a great cellist for a father and a great instrument for a companion. Continue reading
Lorna and I were friends through our daughters playing on the same softball team, and I used to watch her work on her art in the bleachers while we were “watching” the games. Fascinated by a sculpture Lorna was working on one season, I wrote a poem called “Bound Feet” and sent it to her. Continue reading
I am deeply aware that “truth” can be debated; all I can do as a writer is convey the truth that I’ve deduced from evidence. Each person coming to that evidence may find a different way of expressing inferences. A biography, after all, is the intersection of my own biography—my experiences, people I’ve known, my personality— with that of my subject. Continue reading
