The Tribal Knot
Rebecca'a newest nonfiction book, The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change is now available from Indiana University Press and Amazon.
New craft essay just published...
"(Small) World Without End: From Me-More to Memoir" in Soundings, Spring 2013
More essays just published...
"Things Gone the Way of Time" in Brevity
"Adopt a Bench" in The Sun
Upcoming Workshops
Apply now for Rebecca's spring/summer workshops
Just published...
Kenyon Review interview with Rebecca
Word Painting Available on Kindle
Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively is now available as a Kindle edition.
Garrison Keillor reads Rebecca's poem "Autobiography of the Cab Driver..."
"The shortest distance between two points is always under construction."
The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings
Published by The University of Georgia Press
978-0-8203-4593-2 (paperback $19.95) • 0-8203-2353-5 (hardback)
Selections from The Riddle Song
- Aunt ...Maybe some of us were meant from the beginning to be aunts. ...Maybe the powers-that-be give children to those who can survive the love, who know when to let go....
- "Dependent ...Despite what my military I.D. card proclaimed, my laminated face and name stamped with the word "dependent," I was determined never to become one of those quietly nervous women I saw in the laundromat of the apartment complex….This thing I was living was my life…
- Q&A on the writing and shaping of The Riddle Song
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Reviewers' Comments
“Stunningly vivid in its detail, heartbreaking in its emotional vision, this book rings long and true.”-- Kim Barnes
“A dazzling first book of personal essays... Writing rarely gets this emotionally real.”-- Robert Atwan, editor of The Best American Essays
“... opens the door to an important use of memoir as a genre... McClanahan has found a way to make the personal a language for a greater concern." -- Calyx
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“Very few memoirs achieve the raw beauty, the searing honesty, and the transcendent shimmer of McClanahan’s rememberings.”--The Charlotte Observer
"The story is not the story of the family, but the story of memory itself."--Water-Stone
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"McClanahan weaves a quilt that beckons us with its warmth ... without striking a false, much less sentimental, note." --The Georgia Review