About WRITING BIOGRAPHY and IMAGINING LIVES:
• ARTICLES on the pleasures, challenges, and practical problems of imagining a life and writing a narrative.
To Subscribers: The Newsletter where these articles appeared is no longer being updated. I am currently revising the website to include a personal and professional blog called
StoryDriven, which will take over from the Newsletter. I will e-mail subscribers when this is online.
SIGN UP HERE for updates.
You can read past articles in the
NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE (sidebar).
• Article. "Finding Our Voice."© About creating a narrator for the book,
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA.
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The Story of SARA BARD FIELD and CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD
SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE (in progress) is an authorized biography of
SARA BARD FIELD a Baptist minister's wife who, through love and her own determined will, forged herself into a modern woman with a career as a national suffragist and women's rights advocate, an admired California poet, and an "anarchist and free-lover."
Using oral history interviews and thousands of letters,
SARA AND ERSKINE will reconstruct, in vivid detail, the emotional evolution of this fascinating woman and her long and celebrated love affair with the Oregon civil liberties attorney and writer
CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD.
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DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
In this riveting book, American writer
Dona Munker and her Iranian subject and co-author tell a unique life story: the dramatic career and pioneering achievements of an astonishing Iranian social reformer,
Sattareh Farman Farmaian.
The product of a fortunate cross-cultural literary collaboration,
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution is both memoir and historical journalism: an imaginative yet faithful reconstruction of the life and times of one of the most remarkable women the Middle East has produced.
Timely and absorbing,
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA 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.
• To order DAUGHTER OF PERSIA, click on the cover image in the sidebar.
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REVIEWERS on DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem Through the Islamic Revolution has been continuously in print in the United States and abroad since its publication in 1992, translated into five foreign languages, adopted by numerous
book groups and
college courses in the United States and Britain, and read by over a quarter of a million people worldwide. What book critics, Middle East experts, writers, and ordinary readers have said.
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A READER'S GUIDE to DAUGHTER OF PERSIA
DAUGHTER OF PERSIA: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution is the product of an imaginative collaboration between
Dona Munker, an American writer, and the remarkable Persian aristocrat and social reformer,
Sattareh Farman Farmaian.
• Read about creating a narrator for DAUGHTER OF PERSIA in an article,
"Finding Our Voice." Also: A Writer's Perspective on Daughter of Persia (
discussion questions for reading groups) and
Recommendations for reading about
Sattareh Farman Farmaian's Iran.
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LINKS and RECOMMENDATIONS
• Books and websites of related interest.
• Recommendations for help with writing a biography book proposal.
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Picture Credits:
• Center: Detail from 1920 photograph of
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.
• Women by M. A. Taraghijeh, reproduced by permission of
M.A. Taraghijeh.
• Sidebar: • Typewriter courtesy of Prof. Theodore Brown and the National Library of Medicine (also NEWSLETTER page).
• 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 © 2005-2009 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.
