{"id":3021,"date":"2013-10-14T01:40:25","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T05:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=3021"},"modified":"2013-10-14T01:40:25","modified_gmt":"2013-10-14T05:40:25","slug":"life-stories-45-dani-shapiro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2013\/10\/14\/life-stories-45-dani-shapiro\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #45: Dani Shapiro"},"content":{"rendered":"
Subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a><\/h5>\n

\"Life<\/a>
\nillustration: Barry Blitt<\/font><\/p>\n

“The relationship between the teller and the tale is<\/I> the tale in memoir,” Dani Shapiro<\/a> proposes in this week’s episode of Life Stories<\/i>, a podcast series where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir. The book that prompted our discussion, Still Writing<\/i><\/a>, isn’t exactly a memoir, although Shapiro does draw extensively upon her own life in her examination of the writer’s life. At the same time, this isn’t a how-to book—you could call it a creative writing handbook, I suppose, but if so it’s about a particular distillation of advice and experience, or advice refined by experience…<\/p>\n

Among the topics we touch upon as we talk: How equipped the publishing industry is (or isn’t) to handle an author’s decision to veer away from her expected literary trajectory, whether Shapiro started publishing too early, the metaphor of the memoirist picking at the scars of the memories that cut the deepest, and what Shapiro has learned from her yoga practice that she brings to the daily discipline of writing.<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #45: Dani Shapiro<\/a> (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a>, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider reviewing the podcast there!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dani Shapiro’s written two memoirs, Slow Motion and Devotion. Still Writing isn’t like either of those two books, but it does draw upon a memoir-like exploration of Shapiro’s personal history to elaborate her thoughts on taking up the practice of writing. Shapiro tells me what she’s learned about writing over the years, what she’s learned about herself through writing, and how “cultivating the mind that is watching the mind” through yoga has become one of her most effective creative writing tools–plus a whole lot more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,272],"tags":[647,644,132,305,645,646],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3021"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3027,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions\/3027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}