Personal Essays

This paper explores the personal essay form by looking at three personal essays from three differerent writers and time periods. This paper analyses the essays of Oliver Goldsmith, Graham Greene and Sloane Crosley and displays how, despite being diverse in their subject matter and style, the writers use anecdotes, description and universal themes in order to engage readers.

The early years of a human life have a large influence on whom he or she becomes, and his or her characteristics. Most of our childhood experiences register in the brain for a long period and have a significant impact on our behaviors. This part of the brain is responsible for the memories that an individual experiences on witnessing specific events, hearing sounds, or smelling objects.  Individuals experience memories of different moments of their childhood years, irrespective of whether the experiences were happy or sad. My childhood years were full of special and exciting events, which I remember to date, whenever I encounter similar experiences or come across a little child.

Utilising a fusion of memoir, ficto-criticism, literary analysis and creative non-fiction this experimental essay examines the complex and often problematic nature of the travel writing form and its contributions to cultural representation and analysis. The essay criticises the Euro-centric view of the literary history of travel writing and questions established and revered authors both commercial and scholarly. The paper highlights alternate positions drawing on the rich history of travel writing from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In addition, the paper examines current trends particularly in relation to globalisation and post-colonial, feminist contexts. In this way the paper critiques the movement toward travel writing driven by identity politics – erupting in part to critique dominant paradigms but ultimately reducing the capacity of the genre to illuminate beyond naval gazing. The author posits that an additional layer of privilege is enacted here often in the tone of the “coloniser” or “oppressor” in this case the conservative masculine. The paper suggests that travel writing which opens out beyond the self does more to advance the form and address its implicit problematics. Textual analysis is enacted here as an impressionistic move appropriate to the creative non-fiction form. Authors surveyed include Martha Gellhorn, Nick Cave, Matsuo Basho, Marguerite Duras, Teju Cole, Emily Said-Ruete, Andreas Nueman, George Orwell, Ernest Hemmingway, Lady Nijo, Paul Theroux and Alain de Botton.

Ventiquattro articoli, saggi, saggi in forma di racconto e testimonianze personali sul mondo della poesia e la psicologia e la personalità di chi si dichiara poeta. Vincitore del premio Bertolucci 2006 per la critica letteraria. Nuova edizione ampliata a trenta capitoli, Roma, Sossella, 2016.

Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama at University College, Dublin (UCD) and the author of Notes to Self (Tramp Press, 2018), her very successful collection of personal essays. As an academic, she has published extensively in the fields of memory and drama; as an essayist, her work takes us to territories that have been traditionally silenced or edited out of the collective imaginary, both in Ireland and beyond. Her first novel, Ruth & Pen, which will be published in May 2022, explores themes as volatile as infertility, how it affects relationships and how climate change impacts on our 21st-century lives. This interview focuses on Pine's career as a university lecturer and professional writer. It touches upon some of the themes dealt with in her celebrated collection of essays: her father's alcoholism, medical and hospital experiences, mental health issues and the eating disorders that she experienced in her early years.

Co-authored with Laurence W. Mazzeno:  This article considers the central preoccupations and modus operandi of the American writer John Updike as an essayist with personal, autobiographical intent. Best known in the American canon for his many works of fiction, he produced nonfiction in equal measure over the course of his lengthy career. His far-ranging critical reviews and topical, discursive writings have occupied pride of place in the most prominent periodicals of our times and have garnered much critical and popular attention. Yet his specifically self-referential essays, especially those composed in the final years of his life, deserve closer notice for the ways in which they reveal a survival impulse that speaks to the willing vulnerability not only of Updike, but of all who write about themselves.

By the end of the 2007 school year, he had grown faint. The wide toothy smile and copper-colored skin less defined, the baseball cap diminishing into the background of the poster-sized photograph. Dead for more than a year, Juan Carlos Ramos greets everyone from the window at the corner of Portland and Masonic streets in Albany. As August rolled around and parents began buying new backpacks and school supplies, readying their children for the 2007 school year, the family of Juan Carlos Ramos looked for a new picture to replace the one from which he had begun to fade. In Illustration by Stefanie Augustine for MY WORD in Jan. 27, 2008, issue of Sunday magazine. FIRST REPRO RIGHTS ONLY; ok to tease and post with article on sfgate. Ran on: 01-27-2008 THE BOY IN THE WINDOW -SFGate

A personal essay exploring literature's darker influence on our identity and creative development, and how books can serve as autobiographical markers for our psyche. Writers covered include Michael Ondaatje, Cormac McCarthy, Karl Ove Knausgaard, JD Salinger, Harper Lee and Ivan Southall.

Essay about working as a geologist's assistant in the outback of Nevada and Utah as a teenager. Experience of the he empty, wide open spaces and vast horizons of the Intermountain West instills both an appreciation for the natural world and a sense of the spiritual dimension of nature.