Dinty W. Moore

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to "the pursuit of mental rabbits"—a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others—to capture a bit of life on paper. Crafting the Personal Essay is designed to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay in your own writing. This hands-on, creativity-expanding guide will help you infuse your nonfiction with honesty, personality, and energy. You'll discover: An exploration of the basics of essay writing Ways to step back and scrutinize your experiences in order to separate out what may be fresh, powerful, surprising or fascinating to a reader How to move past private "journaling" and write for an audience How to write eight different types of essays including memoir, travel, humor, and nature essays among others Instruction for revision and strategies for getting published Brimming with helpful examples, exercises, and sample essays, this indispensable guide will help your personal essays transcend the merely private to become powerfully universal.

A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction

Crafting The Personal Essay

Literary Nonfiction. Writing Reference. Unmatched in its focus on a concise and popular emerging genre, THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION features 26 eminent writers, editors, and teachers offering expert analysis, focused exercises, and helpful examples of what make the brief essay form such a perfect medium for experimentation, insight, and illumination. With a comprehensive introduction to the genre and book by editor Dinty W. Moore, this guide is perfect for both the classroom and the individual writer's desk—an essential handbook for anyone interested in the scintillating and succinct flash nonfiction form. How many words does it take to tell a compelling true story? The answer might surprise you. Featuring essays from: Barrie Jean Borich, Jenny Boully, Norma Elia Cantú, Rigoberto González, Carol Guess, Jeff Gundy, Philip Graham, Robin Hemley, Barbara Hurd, Judith Kitchen, Eric LeMay, Dinah Lenney, Bret Lott, Patrick Madden, Lee Martin, Maggie McKnight, Brenda Miller, Kyle Minor, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Anne Panning, Lia Purpura, Sue William Silverman, Jennifer Sinor, Peggy Shumaker, Ira Sukrungruang, and Nicole Walker. "THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION, edited by the invaluable Dinty W. Moore, is a lot more than flashy. These thoughtful, thought-provoking essays and exercises have the paradoxical effect of slowing down our attention and encouraging an expansion of the moment, while seeming to be saving writing and reading time. A very useful compilation."—Phillip Lopate, author of Art of the Personal Essay "Flash-in-the-pan? Hardly. The flash nonfiction genre has staying power, and THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION will show you why. Opening with a thorough and informative history of the genre, renowned writer, editor, and teacher Dinty W. Moore assembles a cast of writers who share their expertise, suggest writing exercises, and provide exemplary models of the best flash nonfiction being written today. This book is required reading for any writer, editor, or teacher of the brief nonfiction form."—Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings and Word Painting

Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction

Zoë Bossiere

Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction

The Best of Brevity

"Creative writing professor Dinty W. Moore prescribes remedies for the most common stumbling blocks novelists and memoirists encounter when embarking on their writing project"--

A Book Doctor's Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel Or Memoir

The Story Cure

"This irreverent guide to crafting personal essays and creative nonfiction takes inspiration from the father of the essay, Michele de Montaigne, using lively essays to answer writing questions from top writers like Cheryl Strayed and Philip Lopate"--

advice and confessions on writing, love, and cannibals

Dear mister essay writer guy

"Going beyond the typical "how to write" book, The Mindful Writer illuminates the creative process: where writing and creativity originate, how mindfulness plays into work, how to cultivate good writing habits, how to grow as a writer and a person, and what it means to live a life dedicated to the craft of writing. There's not a writer alive, novice or master, who will not benefit from this book and fall in love with it. Cover to cover, this wise little book is riveting and delightful"--

The Mindful Writer

From cybersex to computer chat, from E-mail to electronic politics, from flames to freedom fighters, Moore embarks on a funny, irreverent inquiry into popular culture and the usefulness of technology. His guiding spirit for the journey--Henry David Thoreau, the quintessential American crank, whose mistrust of the newfangled is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

The Naked Truth About Internet Culture

The Emperor's Virtual Clothes

Between Panic and Desire (American Lives)

A creative writing professor at Ohio University describes how writing and creativity are born, explains how to use mindful writing to cultivate good writing habits and offers inspiration and support to aspiring writers.

Noble Truths of the Writing Life

Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Dinty W. Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author’s early life—the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few—shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today’s world for all who spent their formative years in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroner’s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan—aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.

Between Panic and Desire

As the author looks for the faith he has lost, he explores the different varieties of American Buddhism and tracks down and questions the Dalai Lama

Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, American Style

The Accidental Buddhist

Dante published his ambitious and unusual poem, Divine Comedy, more than seven hundred years ago. In the ensuing centuries countless retellings, innumerable adaptations, tens of thousands of fiery sermons from Catholic bishops and Baptist preachers, all those New Yorker cartoons, and masterpieces of European art have afforded Dante’s fictional apparition of hell unending attention and credibility. Dinty W. Moore did not buy in. Moore started questioning religion at a young age, quizzing the nuns in his Catholic school, and has been questioning it ever since. Yet after years of Catholic school, religious guilt, and persistent cultural conditioning, Moore still can’t shake the feelings of inadequacy, and asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing a myth that merely makes us miserable? In To Hell with It, Moore reflects on and pokes fun at the over-seriousness of religion in various texts, combining narratives of his everyday life, reflections on his childhood, and religion’s influence on contemporary culture and society.

Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno

To Hell with It

Going beyond the typical "how to write" book, The Mindful Writer illuminates the creative process: where writing and creativity originate, how mindfulness plays into work, how to cultivate good writing habits, how to grow as a writer and a person, and what it means to live a life dedicated to the craft of writing. There's not a writer alive, novice or master, who will not benefit from this book and fall in love with it. Cover to cover, this wise little book is riveting and delightful. The Mindful Writer will be a book that readers will turn to again and again as a source inspiration, guidance, and support.

Erin Murphy

Renée K. Nicholson

“Medicine still contains an oral tradition, passed down in stories: the stories patients tell us, the ones we tell them, and the ones we tell ourselves,” writes contributor Madaline Harrison. Bodies of Truth continues this tradition through a variety of narrative approaches by writers representing all facets of health care. And, since all of us have been or will be touched by illness or disability—our own or that of a loved one—at some point in our lives, any reader of this anthology can relate to the challenges, frustrations, and pain—both physical and emotional—that the contributors have experienced. Bodies of Truth offers perspectives on a wide array of issues, from food allergies, cancer, and neurology to mental health, autoimmune disorders, and therapeutic music. These experiences are recounted by patients, nurses, doctors, parents, children, caregivers, and others who attempt to articulate the intangible human and emotional factors that surround life when it intersects with the medical field.

Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine

Bodies of Truth

The funny, provocative, and plain-spoken story of how the author went looking for the faith he had lost explores the different varieties of American Buddhism and tracks down and questions the Dalai Lama. Tour.

Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still

Kevin Haworth

Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of some of America’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Witty, direct, and thought-provoking, these essays offer something to creative writers of all backgrounds and experience. With contributions from fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers, this is a collection of unusual breadth and quality.

Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

Lit from Within

Dinty W. Moore asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing something that only makes us miserable?

Short Stories

Toothpick Men

Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, I have a hot crush on the em dash. What does my need to stuff—while simultaneously fracturing—my sentences—with the meandering, the explanatory, the discursive, the perhaps not-entirely-necessary—say about me? —Cheryl Strayed Have you ever wished there were an advice columnist for writers, but one who didn’t take things so damned seriously? This unique writing guide pairs questions sent in by top contemporary essayists with hilariously witty answers and essays from acclaimed author Dinty W. Moore. Phillip Lopate asks for advice on writing about your ex without sounding like an ass, Julianna Baggott worries that to be a great writer you must drink like a fish, and Roxane Gay asks whether it’s kosher to write about writing. Taking advantage of all the tools available to today’s personal essayist—egregious puns, embarrassing anecdotes, and cocktail napkins—Professor Moore answers these questions, and more, demystifying the world of nonfiction once and for all. With a tip of the hat to history’s most infamous essay—Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”—this book provides rollicking relief for writers in distress.

Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy

Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of some of America’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Witty, direct, and thought–provoking, these essays offer something to creative writers of all backgrounds and experience. With contributions from fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers, this is a collection of unusual breadth and quality. Contributors: Lee K. Abbott, Rick Bass, Claire Bateman, Charles Baxter, Ron Carlson, Billy Collins, Peter Ho Davies, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Robin Hemley, Tony Hoagland, David Kirby, Maggie Nelson, Francine Prose, Mary Ruefle

Dinty W. Moore

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