personal essays
September 24, 2009
- Hi, everyone!I wanted to let you know about three classes I'm teaching at The Writing Salon this fall:*Intro to Creative Writing (9 wks., Tuesdays, 7-9:30 p.m., Oct. 13-Dec. 8, $365):http://www.writingsalons.com/class-descriptions/introcw-pritchett/*Intro to Personal Essays (5 wks., Saturdays, 2-4:30 p.m., Nov. 14-Dec. 19 [skip 11/28], $215): ...
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September 14, 2009
- Last night I watched as Kanye West jumped on stage and took away poor Taylor Swift's moment of glory. Last week I shook my head in disbelief as a member of Congress spew a spontaneous "shout out" that targeted the President of the United States. During the weekend I puzzled over Serena Williams outburst at the U.S. Open in reaction to a line judge's call of a foot fault. I'm not sure ...
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December 22, 2008
- When I was in college studying to become a magazine journalist, I was taught to write what I know. No matter whose class I took or the type of class, the professor always told the students the same thing: Write what you know. The caveat to this rule lay in its reverse: If you can't write about what you know, know about what you write. In other words, become the expert on the topic.Over the ...
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September 14, 2008
- David Foster Wallace’s dismaying suicide sent me back to “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his seminal, riotous essay on taking a Caribbean cruise. I had remembered, or thought I did, a sentence in the piece in which Wallace refers to his death as something exquisitely awful to contemplate and sad beyond imagining— or something to that effect. I couldn’t find ...
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August 20, 2008
- Wikipedia lists several different ways for a person to become a "non-person."I'd like to add one.Give extended notice at your current job before embarking on your new employment.I'm smack dab in the middle of my three-week notice period at USDA. On Sept. 2, I will begin my new job as a writer-editor, media relations, podcaster at the National Institues of Health.Just up the road from ...
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August 18, 2008
- Every year about this time, my mind drifts back to a little single wide trailer in Escatawpa, Mississippi and the studios of the now defunct WGUD-FM – my first full-time radio job. I worked there thirty-one years ago this summer. When I got out of the Navy in May 1977 -- my first wife pregnant with our first born -- we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to be near my twin brother Bob and his ...
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August 14, 2008
- The day was August 14, 2003.I was working for XM Satellite Radio at the time, in the New York City studios. We had a big meeting that day in the DC offices, so I had taken the train down there that morning.It was a hot, muggy, miserable day -- August on the East Coast. But the train was cool and comfortable and there were DRINKS to be enjoyed. So I was feeling pretty relaxed on the ride home. I ...
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June 2, 2008
- One single mother’s account of fighting for her kids on the mean streets of CalabasasKaren Hunt A few months ago I walked out of my house to find a razor sharp javelin stuck in the middle of my front door. It was at eye level, right where my forehead would have been if I’d opened the small window in the door and looked out when I heard the screams and squeals of tires around ...
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April 9, 2008
- One of the wonderful things about words is that they leave a little something to the imagination – even the words black and white are not black and white, as you know if you have ever shopped for black fabric or white paint. I love to knit, crochet, and spin, and spend a good deal of time either doing one of those things, or writing about doing one of those things, so I tend to ...
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March 15, 2008
- I want to talk about how I see. Imagine a world that is flat: undifferentiated, in your eyes, from a painting or a photograph, in which distance and depth are intuited rather than seen. ‘Far away’ is not far away, but up—higher in your field of vision than things that are close to you. You know that the coffee mug at your elbow is closer than the coffee mug on the kitchen shelf beyond it, ...
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