• STORYDRIVEN: Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life is the personal and professional website of writer Dona Munker. I'm working on a book entitled
SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, a psychological biography of the suffragist and poet
Sara Bard Field, and the story of the remarkable love affair between her and the extraordinary Oregon attorney and writer, Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
"StoryDriven"' is about the intersection of research and the biographer's imagination--that is, how a biographer combines research and narrative to tell the story of someone else's life in nonfiction, and the process of interpretation that involves. I'm also deeply interested in
what a story is and in the ways the biographer's creative imagination resembles the novelist's--and the ways it doesn't.
I'm interested as well in what drives biographers (including me) to devote years to exploring someone else's story, in what writing biography tells us about the human condition (including mine), and in the limits of interpretation as a tool for investigating someone else's experience, especially their inner experience.
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If you'd like to read about any of these things, please visit the archive on my "Articles" page or the article on "Finding Our Voice" at
Daughter of Persia: A Reader's Guide (sidebar). And if you'd like to comment, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
Send me a comment.
If you'd like to be notified about any future Internet activities of mine, 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 and your name will be added to the notification list.
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Meanwhile, here are some thoughts from others that I've found inspiring, helpful, comforting, or provocative, often all at once.
• A STORYTELLER'S DEFINITION OF "STORY"
"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.
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• 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, 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech .
• 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.
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Picture credits:
Center column: Photo by
Hiroko Yoshimoto.
• Sidebar: Sara Bard Field and C.E.S. Wood by W. E. Dassonville; reproduced with permission of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley.
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Notice of Copyright:
• All material on this website
Copyright © 2005-2010 by Dona Munker except where expressly stated or contributed by others. Copying, altering, or reproducing this material in any form without written permission is prohibited by law and may be prosecuted regardless of the venue or purpose of the copying.
