As a book lover and as a nonfiction writer and researcher, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a book is truly a portal that can connect people across time and space. I’m a Catholic (stray) by education and tradition, and for me this interconnectivity resonates with the familiar theology of the communion of saints. Whether you are religious or not, if you love words, there is something rather miraculous about how language, past and present, from authors living and dead, can connect and surprise us and spark new conversations even with those yet to be born. You never know who may need to hear what you are putting on the page.
I wrote
Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman
You have probably seen the film version starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan—which I also highly recommend! But Sixsmith’s original book demonstrates how an experienced yet disenchanted writer can find their own way, and make an international impact, by helping another person discover the hideous truth.
Philomena Lee was a woman from Roscrea, Ireland, who, after fifty years, could no longer endure the torment of not knowing what had happened to her toddler son, taken from her at a Catholic home for unwed mothers and sold to an American couple. Unbeknownst to Philomena, her son later went searching for her.
Sixsmith blends these two histories together in a story with many political and personal layers, including only an occasional, seamless glimpse of his amazing research process.
Inspiring the film starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, and directed by Stephen Frears, Philomena is the tale of a mother and a son whose lives were scarred by the forces of hypocrisy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the secrets they were forced to keep.
With a foreword by Judi Dench, Martin Sixsmith's book is a compelling and deeply moving narrative of human love and loss, both heartbreaking yet ultimately redemptive.
When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary to be looked…
I have admired Wideman for many years. As a writer, he is a virtuoso in multiple forms, making room to confront violence and racism without offering readers trite or false resolutions.
I appreciate how he keeps calling back to the themes and subjects of earlier work. His essay, “Looking at Emmett Till” (originally published in Issue 19 of Creative Nonfiction), grappled with his recollections of 1955 as a 14-year-old teenager, the same age as Emmett Till when he was lynched and murdered.
Writing to Save a Life builds upon this work, tracing a parallel history of Till’s father, Louis, and Wideman’s journey to confront official documents of Louis’s prosecution and hanging during his service in World War II. Here as in so much of his writing, Wideman chooses a unique structure for the book, braiding his own reflections on injustice into the documentary material.
This book made me reflect deeply on whom we praise as trailblazing “rebels” and who we ignore, erase, or brand with criminal status in the stories we inherit and then repeat thoughtlessly.
Hartman reimagines “transgression” through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, and class in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia. She immerses us in up-close and poignant stories of women’s nonconformity, showing how their choices were flexes not only for survival but for thriving, a refusal to be defined by the ugliest social denigrations of their time (as well as our own).
Wayward Lives is richly sourced, including recovered photographs with the evocative literary portraits. It is a moving, haunting, unforgettable book.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading…
I was late to discover this book, but I devoured it instantly. Una’s is a hybrid work, a mixture of memoir and criminal history in stunning graphic novel form.
She tells her account of growing up in West Yorkshire, UK, in 1977 when the serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe (dubbed “the Yorkshire Ripper”—ick) was still at large. Her book connects her own traumatic history with local newspaper and media accounts as well as broader statistics of sexual violence and the failures of formal investigations.
By the conclusion, Una builds to her own recovery and survival process and creates one of the most beautiful endings—drawings only—I have ever experienced in a book delving into such heart-wrenching subject matter.
OK, so Marcel Marceau was totally famous as a French mime artist, and his history has not been exactly “lost.” But I was intrigued by the idea of a biography that focuses on someone who was known for performing through silence, mastering silence itself as an art of communication.
Every page in Wen’s book is a surprise! First, she creates an impressionistic rather than traditional biography. There are source notes at the end, like a usual work of nonfiction, but her book fits easily in the palm of your hand and resembles a collection of poems more than the usual biographical tome.
Each segment invites a re-reading, a back and forth, that evokes the ever-kinetic and elusive interplay of Marceau’s living art. “Videos and photographs remind you how transient the stage is,” Wen writes, taking on Marceau’s persona at one point. “So you replay the dancing ghost in your head and pray to get it right.”
In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.
Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
