Motherland

Writer Dani Shapiro Writing brings form to experience. It provides an order to life and, in the process, writing alters memory. In Sunday's New York Times Book Review section, writer Dani Shapiro states that readers "often think that writing a memoir must be cathartic. But, if anything, I found that it embeds the story more deeply in the writer. The story becomes frozen, in a way, by crafting of it. ...

FSG, March 2010 You write in your Author's Note that the book represents the experiences of your mother and other child emigres from Germany of that era. Just curious ... was Aunt Mildred wholly your mother's experience? Edith's story in "N or D" came directly from my mother's experiences. I didn't even change the names of her relatives. The book is a work of historical fiction because I assumed my ...

Author Tim O'Brien In The Things They Carried, author Tim O'Brien writes about the challenge of writing about his traumatic experiences in Vietnam: "I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words...and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a ...

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Movie poster of "Get Low" If I were teaching a writing class right now, I would require all my students to go see the new movie, Get Low, with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray and Lucas Black. Sure that's an all-star cast, but that's not the reason for my insistence. For those who study narrative drive, this movie is masterful in its storytelling. My writing guru, Sol Stein explains ...

Here is the review of Is it Night or Day? by the Voices of Youth Advocates (VOYA), the library magazine servicing those who serve young adults: In 1938 Edith Westerfeld is twelve years old when her family puts her on a ship in Bremen,Germany that carries her to the Deutchland, an oceanliner that transports her to New York City. From there, all alone, she is put on a train to ...

Word of the Day August 28 To my delight, today's word-of-the-day from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is "veridical." veridicalvuh-RID-ih-kul adjective 1 : truthful, veracious 2 : not illusory : genuine What pleased me most is the sentence the dictionary used to showcase the word: "All psychotherapies are based on the fact that memory is not veridical, that unconscious desires and fantasies exert their force on us all..." (Henry Kaminer, Weekly Standard, ...

To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

Crumstadt, Germany My mother's cousin, Elisa Levi, recently sent this email after reading, Is It Night or Day?. When Elisa was a child, she and her family fled Crumstadt, Germany for Uruguay. My mother and Elisa have corresponded and visited each other since 1938, the year my mother left Germany. Dear Edith: I finished reading Fern's book. It made me relive all the sorrows and fears I experienced in Germany ...

My new web site showcasing my school presentations has gone live at AIVS (Authors and Illustrators who Visit Schools). Please visit: http://www.authorsillustrators.com/schumer_chapman/schumer_chapman.htm