T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of

“Every person creates a life story, arranging past experience in narrative form with beginning, middle, and end. Such ordering of existential disorder is the work of memory, and is essential to self awareness; indeed, the narrative is the soul of selfhood. But memory is imprecise, and must be measured against other accounts. Falsifying matters of official record crosses a bright line — both of ethics and foolishness. The raw material of self invention must be “true.’’ This happened, and not that. To imagine otherwise is mental illness.”

Terrific post. Timely for me as well since I attended a WordCamp this past weekend and saw almost everything described inn the post.

“Conferences are still popular because we want to be spellbound, and still the best way to do that is to tell a story. It’s not as if there’s no place for audio-visual aids – there were some powerful pictures at this conference, that moved some of the audience to tears – but the truth is that we come to conferences to see and hear people.”


T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of twenty books of fiction, including, most recently, After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), Tooth and Claw (2005), The Human Fly (2005), Talk Talk (2006), The Women (2009), Wild Child (2010) and When the Killing's Done (2011). He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968. He has been a member of the

“Last week I had coffee with Cara Solomon, a former journalist for the Seattle Times and founder of thesmallstory.com. Cara’s site is based on a premise that I believe in deeply: that everyone has an interesting story to tell.
Through Cara I uncovered a treasure trove of tips and tricks for my storytelling project. Among them, these were my favorites:…”