(Here’s a list of titles—in all genres—that graduate students in the MFA Creative Nonfiction program at the University of Pittsburgh say have made a difference to them. These are titles MFAers discovered or finally read while in the graduate program that helped to change their writing, or the way they think about writing. Survey was conducted in December 2004 and compiled by K.Tarr.)
Refuge Terry Tempest Williams
False Papers Andre Aciman
For the Time Being Annie Dillard
The Same Sea Amos Oz
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
North Towards Home Willie Morris
Translations Anne Sexton
The Sacred Journey Frederick Buechner
Blue Pastures Mary Oliver
Nickle & Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich
Brothers & Keepers John Edgar Wideman
Me Talk Pretty One Day David Sedaris
My Sister Life Maria Flook
The Last Cowboy Jane Kramer
Pump House Gang Tom Wolfe
Radical Chic Tom Wolfe
My Misspent Youth Meghan Daum
Boys of My Youth Joann Beard
American Gods Neil Gaman
(fantasy fiction)
Sunshine Robin McKinley
(fantasy/sci-fi)
Black Projects/White Knights Kage Baker
(fantasy)
(fiction)
A Fan’s Notes Fred Exely
Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
Time’s Arrow Martin Amos
Mornings Like This Annie Dillard
(poetry)
Magical Thinking Augustine Burrows
Holidays on Ice David Sedaris
(fiction and nonfiction)
The Man Who MistookHis Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
Peace Kills P.J. O’Rourke
Boogers Are My Beat Dave Barry
Slouching Towards Bethelem Joan Didion
In Fact: Best of Creative Nonfiction Lee Gutkind
The Winged Seed Li-Young Lee
(poetry)
An Elementary Treatise on Percival Frost
Curve Tracing
In the Heart of the Heart of
The Country
William Gass
House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski
Gravity and Grace Simone Weil
One Man’s Bible Gao Xingjian
Songlines Bruce Chatwin
I Could Tell You Stories Patricia Hampl
Brown Richard Rodriguez
Eye of the Poet David Citino
The Next American Essay
John D'Agata
SOME FAVORITE QUOTES ON WRITING:
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."
---Czeslaw Milosz
“Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection of beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.”
---Azar Nafisi
“I have only three criteria for what I go on reading and teaching: aesthetic spendor, intellectual power, wisdom…The mind always returns to its needs for beauty, truth, and insight.”
---Harold Bloom
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
---Joan Didion
“Writing always takes ego. If you check your ego at the door, you will never write another word.”
---Norman Mailer
“It is always good to work on as many writing projects as possible. That way, when one goes awry you can always turn to another project when one goes badly.”
---Aimee Bender
“Go with the confessional. I love the confessional.”
---Chang Rae Lee
“I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”
---Franz Kafka
“Memoirists wish to tell their minds, not their story.”---Patricia Hampl
(You might also visit Bruce Dobler's Creative Nonfiction Compendium, with listings and notes on top anthologies and Dobler's "Top 40.")