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"Wolff, Geoffrey"
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A day at the beach : recollections
With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family. He shares with us, then, the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together -- with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility.
Book
Write It
Authority of statement implies authority of composition: \"There is one story and one story only/that will prove worth your telling,\" Robert Graves's \"To Juan at the Winter Solstice\" begins, and Rilke's \"Archaic Torso of Apollo\" ends, \"You must change your life.\" Or what use it could be to know. (from \"Heart's Needle #9\") In the opening lines of \"The Circus Animals' Desertion,\" W.B. Yeats confesses the setbacks he encountered in starting the poem, but his worksheets reveal that he arrived at this strategy over multiple drafts, eventually adopting an intricate rhyming stanza. Maybe at last being but a broken man I must be satisfied with my heart Elizabeth Bishop also chose a demanding form-the villanelle, requiring a strict pattern of repetition-for her poem \"One Art,\" which concludes: \" Bacon's antipathy toward his art, which may have led him to ruin masterpieces, places Mackay's generosity in a more forgiving light. When Yeats begins \"The Circus Animals\" Desertion\" bemoaning his inability to begin it, and Bishop coaxes herselfto the finish line of \"One Art,\" each poet overcomes internal misgivings.
Journal Article
Searching for Benny's Grave
Searching for Benny’s Grave is the memoir of a highly accomplished middle-aged woman who still yearns for the love of her ninety-year-old father—a former Nazi prisoner of war and veteran of three wars. The woman and her father are survivors.The narrator feels that her father rejected her when, as a young girl, she didn’t conform to his vision of a traditional female. Their relationship disintegrated when she threw away her full Reserve Officers’ Training Corps college scholarship. Now, as an adult, she makes one last attempt to please him—she searches for his baby brother’s grave so that her father can finally say good-bye to Benny.The craft essay describes the author’s use of persona to write through her pain with reflection, syntax, and psychic distance. The essay defines key terms and concepts, debates the honesty of using a persona, and describes some of the key craft tools that underpin a persona.The narrator’s persona changes throughout the arc of the story. The narrator embodies a victim-oriented persona in the beginning but ends with a warrior-oriented persona. The conclusion incorporates what the author has learned and highlights the rewrite of a shameful memory using a persona.
Dissertation
Spring 2015 M.F.A. Update: Choices and Voices
M.F.A. programs have become as competitive as first-rate medical and law schools (in some cases more), but many writers still choose where they apply based on a combination of intuition, ego, geography, fandom, and other circumstances. Rufi Thorpe's application trajectory, full of emotional asides and gut decisions, doesn't much sound like the kind of advice published on the Poets & Writers Speakeasy (an online forum where applicants can exchange advice) or the M.F.A. Blog.
Trade Publication Article
Wolf man
This creative nonfiction dissertation is a memoir that probes the complex life and death of the author’s father, who became addicted in his late forties to crack cocaine. While the primary concerns are the reasons and ways in which the father changed from a family man into a drug addict, the memoir is also concerned with themes of family life, childhood, and grief. After his father’s death, the author moves to Las Vegas and experiences similar addiction issues, which he then explores to help shed light on his father’s problems. To enrich the investigation, the author draws from eclectic sources, including news articles, literature, mythology, sociology, religion, music, TV, interviews, and inherited objects from his father. In dissecting the life of his father, the author simultaneously examines broader issues surrounding modern fatherhood, such as cultural expectations, as well as the problems of emptiness, isolation, and spiritual deficiency.
Dissertation
Bending Over Backward For a Well-Known Lout
In researching [John O'Hara]'s life, Mr. [Geoffrey Wolff] writes, he was ''puzzled by a recurring inconsistency between the summary judgments of his character by strangers and the affectionate testimonials of his friends,'' but he finds that he is unable to get any of O'Hara's friends to offer much in the way of insight. ''Just as O'Hara only rarely could or wished to tell why, specifically, hand-lasted shoes made his pulse quicken,'' he says, ''his friends rarely specified why he made their hearts lift.'' In other instances Mr. Wolff trades his role as biographer for that of omniscient novelist or memoirist, issuing bizarrely personal pleas on behalf of O'Hara for understanding and patience. In trying to explain the rancor O'Hara provoked in his hometown, Pottsville, Pa., with his fictionalized portraits of that community, Mr. Wolff draws analogies with his own experiences in writing a novel called ''Providence'' set in that Rhode Island city. In much the same way that Mr. Wolff tries to inflate O'Hara's reputation by mentioning his name in the same breath as James, Wharton and [F. Scott Fitzgerald], he also tries to boost his legacy by arguing that Harold Pinter and David Mamet are his heirs in terms of ''dialogue as combat.'' Such clumsy efforts to make O'Hara's work seem more important than it is undermine this book's more sober-minded assessments of the writer's gifts: an eye for detail in his early work, an easy declarative style, an intuitive understanding of ambition and status and envy. His efforts also distort the arc of O'Hara's career, obscuring the reasons that his fiction grew increasingly bloated and garrulous with later novels like ''A Rage to Live'' and ''From the Terrace.''
Newspaper Article
