Dona Munker: Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life

PODCAST: Writer Dona Munker talks about Sattareh Farman Farmaian and Daughter of Persia

BEHIND THE BOOKS
          Biography:
            The Story of SARA BARD FIELD and CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD
                  SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE (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."
                    Biographical Nonfiction:
                        DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
                          A timely, riveting account of the life and work of an extraordinary Iranian aristocrat and social reformer, Sattareh Farman Farmaian, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA is at once memoir and historical journalism. It opens a personal window on Iran and America's involvement in the six tumultuous decades that laid the foundations of the crisis facing the United States and the West today.
                                REVIEWERS on DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
                                  What critics, Middle East experts, writers, and general readers have said about Daughter of Persia.
                                      A READER'S GUIDE to DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
                                        • Article: "Finding Our Voice."
                                          • Discovering the right literary "voice" for Daughter of Persia.
                                          • For Reading Groups:
                                              • A Writer's Perspective on Daughter of Persia Reading Group Questions.
                                                • Reading Recommendations. A personal selection.
                                                • • Also:
                                                LINKS and RECOMMENDATIONS
                                                Books and websites of related interest. • For first-time biographers: Helpful guides to writing a biography book proposal.
                                                Find Authors

                                                Dona Munker:
                                                  Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life
                                                ARTICLES
                                                  from the NEWSLETTER

                                                   In the ARCHIVE on the right, you can read ARTICLES from NEWSLETTER: IMAGINING A LIFE AND THE CRAFT OF BIOGRAPHY.

                                                   Subscribers: The Newsletter has been suspended because I'm revising the website to include a blog, "StoryDriven. Writing a Biography and Imagining a Life". This will take over from the Newsletter and explore and reflect on many different aspects of the process and the significance—professional, practical, and personal—of writing and thinking about a biography.

                                                   I will e-mail subscribers when StoryDriven goes online. If you're already on the mailing list, you'll be hearing from me. If not, sign up in the box provided in the right sidebar (be sure to click on the confirmation link that arrives in your e-mail) and I'll let you know.

                                                   You can still read past articles in the NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE, as well as another article about writing a biographical narrative, "Finding Our Voice".

                                                     And I still love hearing from visitors, including other biographers. Please use my CONTACT PAGE to e-mail me.

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                                                  • About the NEWSLETTER ARTICLES.

                                                     The Newsletter articles examine the pleasures and challenges of planning, researching, and constructing biography or biographical nonfiction.

                                                    The experience others have had in writing and researching nonfiction is an important resource. In each article, I try to focus on a different facet of researching, envisioning, and writing a narrative in biography, either by describing how I dealt with a specific technical or creative issue that all writers of biography and biographical nonfiction can expect to encounter, or by discussing a solution I found—or didn't find, as the case may be—for a problem.

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                                                    • A resource for biographers, prospective biographers, and readers.


                                                     NEWSLETTER ARTICLES are a practical resource for professional writers of nonfiction, advanced students of nonfiction writing, academic researchers, and others who may be writing or thinking of writing biographical nonfiction.

                                                    Articles are also meant for general readers interested in how biographies get written, or simply in the mental processes and work lives of writers.

                                                    All articles are available in the NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE (sidebar, this page).

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                                                  • What is Biographical Nonfiction?

                                                    I use the term "biographical nonfiction" as well as biography in order to cover not only what Eric Hobsbawm rather unfairly called "Victorian tomes," but also such works as (for example) Dava Sobel's LONGITUDE, which examines a life in terms of a single contribution to history; Betty Boyd Caroli's THE ROOSEVELT WOMEN, a generational chronicle of a family; or my own book, DAUGHTER OF PERSIA, which is a hybrid of memoir and historical journalism.

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                                                  Picture Credit:

                                                  Center column: Photograph of Smith-Corona Electra 210 Typewriter (ca. 1965) reproduced by permission of Prof. Theodore Brown and the National Library of Medicine.

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                                                  Notice of Copyright:

                                                      • All material on this website Copyright © 2005-2009 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.
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                                                  NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE


                                                  • No. 3: April 2007.
                                                  Finding the Story, 1
                                                  • No. 2: Feb. 2007.
                                                  Chronology
                                                  • No. 1: Sept. 2006.
                                                  Biography and Literary Imagination

                                                  • This website is about what it's like to tell the story of another person'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 and the process of writing and thinking about someone else'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 right sidebar of my "Articles" page, then click on the automatic confirmation link that arrives in your e-mail.




                                                  Watch a video on "Imagining a Life in Biography."

                                                  Sara Bard Field with Charles Erskine Scott Wood in 1920, after their "free union" on San Francisco's Russian Hill. SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, a biography of Sara Bard Field is under contract to Doubleday.     • Excerpts from the working draft are posted in the the StoryDriven.Net JOURNAL. (Temporarily offline.)

                                                  DAUGHTER OF PERSIA. A Woman's Journey From Her Father's Harem Through the Islamic Revolution.

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