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Dona Munker:
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 • This website is about what goes into telling the story of someone else's life—that is, it's about writing a biography, though not necessarily the traditional kind.
I'm currently revising these pages to include a blog called "StoryDriven," where I'll be considering many different aspects—personal as well as professional—of the experience, the process, and the significance of writing and thinking deeply about the story of another person's life. I'll let visitors know when StoryDriven goes online. If you'd like to be notified, please enter your e-mail address in the SIGNUP BOX in the sidebar of the "Articles" page, then click on the automatic confirmation link that arrives in your e-mail. Meanwhile, here are some words from other storytellers that I've found inspiring, helpful, provocative, or all three. • A STORYTELLER'S DEFINITION OF "STORY" The following explanation of what a story is (as opposed to narrative or plot), by memoirist, essayist, and teacher Vivian Gornick, is the best one I know for a writer planning to tell the story of a life. "Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say." —Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, p. 13. • THE MISSION OF LITERATURE "I still believe that the mission of literature is to tell a story, where there is tension and where the reader does not know at the beginning what the end will be." —Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech . Yes, biographers, that means us. • WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY? "The illogical feeling that your subjects somehow choose you is common to many biographers." —Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Pantheon, 2000), p. 4.  BOOKS: • "Lyrical and enchanting....Beautifully written." —The New York Times Book Review.
 Watch a video on "Imagining a Life in Biography."
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