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Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life


• 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.





      Write to Dona Munker at StoryDriven.Net.

         For information about this website, please go to the SITE MAP.

         For articles on StoryDriven: Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life on the practical problems of researching and building a narrative and the nonfiction creative process itself, go to the ARCHIVE. You can also read about this process in "Finding Our Voice,"©, a discussion of the creative collaboration that produced the book, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA.


      BOOKS:





      "Lyrical and enchanting....Beautifully written."The New York Times Book Review.


      IN PROGRESS
        is about a search for love that turned a Baptist minister's wife into a nationally known suffragist and women's rights advocate, a California poet, and an "anarchist and free-lover" who risked everything to be with her remarkable soul-mate.
          BIOGRAPHY
          is a riveting account of the life and work of an extraordinary Iranian aristocrat and social reformer, Sattareh Farman Farmaian, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA is at once a memoir and a work of historical journalism that is still relevant today, opening a personal window on Iran and America's involvement in the six tumultuous decades that laid the foundations of the present-day crisis now facing the United States and the West.
                ARTICLES
                The biographer's craft, what a story is, whether biography can ever be an art, and more.
                RESOURCES
                Take advantage of a growing list of resources for anyone interested in biography and writing lives.