Dona Munker: Storydriven, a Website on Writing Biography.

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Dona: I was saddened to learn of your mother's death. I would like to send you a letter but not by email. Could you please send me your mailing address. Carol Cord Melitsoff

   •As a professional Video Biographer, I enjoy and appreciate your website very much. RJ McHatton Inventive Productions Bellevue, WA

   •Great to hear from a biographer in another medium — I've always been curious about how visual biographers tell stories, as opposed to writers of books, and about the parallels and differences between their crafts. I began wondering about this after learning that popular fiction in the 1940s and 1950s was heavily influenced by the cinematic requirements of a movie industry authors hoped to sell novels to.

   I'm still hoping—never say die—that blogware from this website's sponsor is just around the corner. Should that ever happen, which I'm now told should be sometime in spring, 2008, I hope you'll be back to start a discussion. —DONA.

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   • I just copied segments of your April 2007 newsletter and printed them in large print for prominent posting in my office. SITUATION — STORY — NARRATIVE = LOCOMOTIVE — ENGINE — TRACKS. Most helpful to me as a beginning biographer are the warning signs you post along those tracks: something like "don't stop at this station" (avoid the laundry list and lifeless rehearsal of a situation) and "please not here either" (the mountain of factual details); "keep going, Grand Central ahead" (situation-based and interpretive biography).

   I read Vivian Gornick's book and liked it; thanks for the recommendation. Also for the clarification of the use of "flashback" — as a description and a device.

   Your newsletters are a treasure! I look forward to the blog. —MICHAEL J. HELQUIST.

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      •Thanks —delighted. I'm looking forward to having a blog, too. Hope the Authors Guild will have the software soon. (Hear that, Webmaster?) —DONA.

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   • What a fascinating journey! I stumbled upon this part of your web site while looking up "Daughter of Persia" which I plan to read very soon. I am now even more interested in Sara Bard and how she evolved. Looking forward to reading her story. When do you think that you will be ready to publish? —JANETTE BROWN.

   • My editor shares your curiosity. I'm hoping in a couple of years.

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   • In the process of developing an understanding of Sara Bard Field have you had an opportunity to talk with anyone who knew her? Did the conversation add to your original impressions and conclusions? —MICHAEL K. GREENE.

   • Oh, boy. That's a huge question. I've been able to interview maybe a dozen people who knew Sara, including her daughter and grandchildren, as well as some of Erskine's grandchildren. Some, like her daughter, could tell me about her as a young woman; others knew her in middle and old age, but also for long, continuous periods of time.
   More recently, through sheer dumb luck, I've met people who knew her well for relatively short periods. That was really fascinating, because I could see how she evolved. Through them, I've been introduced to a Sara caught up in the grief of Erskine's death, and then to the Sara who subjequently adjusted to his loss. I also got to know the younger Sara better, the one who fell in love with Erskine, and in a way I hadn't known her before.
   Later I thought about how true it is that we're all different from what we were 10, 15, or 20 years ago, even though we're also (usually) the same person. All these people who knew my subject at different times saw a different Sara. Made me ask myself how someone I meet in twenty years will describe me?

   • That is an interesting response and makes me think I should get to know the me I never met.

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    • I should have been finishing projects for work, but had to find out what happened to Satti, so avidly read the final 50 pages of "Daughter of Persia" until I finished it. I haven't had much time to read, so when I read for pleasure, it is usually fiction. So when I say that "Daughter of Persia" is good and should be widely read, I mean it! Your writing is exquisite and the biography reads like a novel! I definitely recommend it for those Americans who would like to get a better understanding of the Persian culture. It is beautifully written, interesting, informative, and really SHOULD be read by Americans to better understand Iran. — JANETTE BROWN.

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    • You've made me blush — but hell, I can take it. Seriously, however, I think it would be great if more writers of nonfiction would think about choosing real-life stories like Sattareh Farman Farmaian's or Sara Bard Field's. I believe that readers today are hungry for stories that can bring history alive through the eyes of people who live(d) through it. I'm sure that so-called "reality shows," bad though their reputation is, are a symptom of that hunger, which must come from some atavistic human need to make sense of the world. There's no better way of doing that than being transported to another era and connecting with it through the stories of "ordinary" people who lived there.
    Stories that can do that aren't always easy to find, though they often leave a paper trail — letters, diaries, family stories someone once bothered to write down, oral histories. And once you've found them, you have to be willing to teach yourself the skills and devote the time, patience, and effort it takes to first collect all the information and then tell the story in an interesting way that also has historical depth and accuracy. (Not least because there's no other way these days to get a publisher interested in someone "nobody ever heard of," especially a woman. But that's for another time.)
    Anyway, thanks for letting me know that DAUGHTER OF PERSIA did what a great true-life story like Sattareh's should do for the reader. Makes it all worthwhile.

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    • Hello Dona: You wrote that you love emails - so here goes. The information that you and Sattareh put together in Daughter of Persia is so timely to current events that I was overwhelmed. My wife got rather tired of my exclamations over the content and the insights. Being a member of the Baha'i Faith, and having traveled and worked at various times as a geologist in the mid-east, I have more than a normal curiosity about the current events related to the status of the Persian Baha'i community and the individuals whom I have met over the years.
    More importantly though, it is your presentation of the role of the CIA and our government that puts the current emotional responses of the Iranian politicians and populace into a perspective for me. I would wish that the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush team would read your book. The question for me is what I should do about it all? Now that I am semi retired and putting more hours and days into my endeavors then I ever did when employed, I will add the question to my "what-to-do" next list. —LANCE MEAD, Brandon, Vermont.

    • Hi, Lance. Thanks so much, especially for saying that the book opened your eyes to the historical context that we’re all bumbling along in now. Tragically, some people are bumbling along without knowing it, so if you do figure out what to do about it all, I hope you'll share the information with the rest of us.

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    • I'd like to know if you got to visit Iran while you and Sattareh were working on Daughter of Persia? —SOURI FROM TEXAS.

    • No. I've never been there. At the time, it was considered unsafe for Americans to go. And I was very nervous about calling Iranian authorities' attention to the book — there were almost no books about Iran for Westerners then and I wanted to avoid doing anything that might get Sattareh or her relatives in Iran into trouble.
    She turned out to be critical mainly of the Shah, the CIA, and American policy, but all I knew at the time was that she was extremely outspoken, and I was afraid of somehow endangering her. Especially after Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, which happened about two years into our collaboration.

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   • Dear Dona: I LOVE your website! —FRANCES L. FELDMAN, Pasadena, CA.

   •Thanks, Mom.

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