But autobiographical novels like Andrea Hirata’s The Rainbow Troops seem less common today. Some novels contain an autobiographical element, but few marketing departments type it up in their promotional materials. Usually, unless they need to manipulate the truth extensively, authors opt to write a memoir, a genre that sells better and that remains a bit further out along on the fact continuum.
Read my essay at the Paris Review Daily: “Toward the end of 1918, infantry from the U.S. Army’s 85th Division occupied Arkhangelsk, a city in North Russia on the shore of the White Sea.”
Every year for three years I attended the Eckerd College Writers’ Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, and this year is no exception. … Even though it’s dark outside, I’m going to brew some coffee and stay up, writing, puzzling over this scene and that sentence. Tomorrow I get to wake up and drive to the airport to pick up some of the faculty. The drive will take us across the open waters of Tampa Bay. But that’s in the future. Right now, in the room where I’m writing, there’s nothing stopping me from finishing this book.
In the first year of my MFA program, it became clear that the university had no intention of giving us real-world publishing experience. It’s not their fault; they were set up primarily to train graduate students how to teach, because every freshman had to take English 101 and 102, and they didn’t have the budget to pay full-time adjuncts. A lot of universities balance their budgets on the backs of graduate students, and I don’t resent them for it. However, it did mean that if we wanted experience in the publishing industry, we would have to find it ourselves.
