Since I started this blog last summer, I've had a new baby, taught several classes, and made some progress on research and writing. My new son will be three months old this week, and I'm working as hard as I can on my writing during my maternity leave from teaching. Something about having another, beautiful new baby makes me want to write even more--I feel the pressure to fulfill my own goals as I start to raise my boys to create their own rich lives. And the days when I am well-rested enough to think clearly about memoir-writing are few and golden... I've always loved the German fiction writer W.G. Sebald. He taught at the University of East Anglia, where I was a writing student in 1995-1996. I didn't read Sebald until my first year at Stanford in 2001, the year he died in car accident.
In 2011, when I was at Queen's University, Belfast, I went to a talk on Sebald. (Where are my notes on that talk--that March when my first son was three months old?)
Anyway, in moments of inattention to my own writing (the doc file is called "Official Narrative and has reached 3000 words), I'm reading my favorite memorists: Howard Norman, Mary McCarthy, Geoffrey and Toby Wolff. And strangely, Sebald. His narrators often seem like himself; his concerns are always the concerns of the serious memoirist--memory and history. So why not classify Sebald as a memoirist for our own purposes in this blog. Maybe if I turn him into a member of the tribe he'll reach out and help us from beyond.
Here's a list of writing tips from Sebald compiled by one of his last students:
http://richardskinner.weebly.com/2/post/2013/01/max-sebalds-writing-tips.html
And his obit. I've been reading a lot of obits lately in my research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html