No, this is not going to be about Tiger Woods, I could also call the post When to Show Your Words to the People You’re Writing About.

I’m following the lead of fellow Barkers Jason, Amanda, Kathryn, Shira, and Jaime and blogging about something that I’ve been pondering because of AWP.

At a panel called “Exploitation, Empowerment, and Everything In Between: Women on Writing Sex,” Kathleen Rooney talked about family reading your writing. When Rooney wrote an essay about Brazilian waxing, her mother (who uses the word bottom instead of vagina) remarked “What makes you think your bottom is so special you have to put it in an essay?” (This is my favorite quote of the whole conference.)

I usually don’t show my family what I write, not because I want to spare their feelings, I’m just not sure what to do with their feedback. I love other writers critiquing my writing—their edit suggestions make me look better—but thinking about my family’s opinions muddles the writing process for me. Something about having to take their feelings into consideration blocks me completely, even though I’m very comfortable with them reading my prose once it’s published. Maybe because I’m off the hook then and can’t change anything. Read more »

A Common Pornography is the perfect title for a memoir that reminds us there is no such thing. Following his father’s death in 2008, Kevin Sampsell’s family began to speak more honestly about their history, its “disturbing threads,” and Sampsell was compelled to expand his sixty-page memory experiment of the same title into a collage of both his youth and the experiences of his family. The memoir, recently published by Harper Perennial, strings together vignettes, some only a paragraph, some five or six pages, to tell Kevin Sampsell’s story. Read more »