Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link roundup has the perfect solution to kick-start your week – Celebrity Autobigraphy. It’s  drop dead funny and a stark reminder that trivia in the guise of memoir is just bad writing. On a more serious note, I highly recommend the interview with Dudley Clendinen in “..building stories from life and choosing grace in death.”

• Where Stories Are Remembered. “Mr. Kamara has taught for two decades at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But as with his forebears, the identity that means the most to him is that of a storyteller. “Not the kind of storyteller you listen to when you’re sitting around a fire, and maybe it’s raining, and you’re scared to go home,” he said. His stories have to do with genealogy, cosmology and similarly great subjects, and are told while others dance and perform music, making them true multimedia performances.” [Thanks to APH member Marcy Davis for alerting me to this item.]

• Sixth National Women’s Memoir Conference. [April 13-15, 2012 Wyndham Hotel, Austin, Texas] “Stories from the Heart VI will bring women from around the country to celebrate our stories and our lives. Through writing, reading, listening, and sharing, we will discover how personal narrative is a healing art, how we can gather our memories, how we can tell our stories. “

• Dudley Clendinen on building stories from life and choosing grace in death. “Our latest Editors’ Roundtable examines Dudley Clendinen’s “The Good Short Life,” a career journalist’s startling response to being diagnosed with ALS…Clendinen has written for GQ, the St. Petersburg Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times, among many other publications. Clendinen was kind enough to take the time – a commodity that has become precious to him – to talk with us about his essay. In these excerpts from our conversation, he addresses using his life as material, coming out on the op-ed page of the New York Times, and the upside of getting “paid to die.”

• Everybody Has a Story. “The story starts with a dart and a map. Over a shoulder, the dart is thrown, and where it stops no one knows. Once the dart lands on a town, Steve Hartman goes there and calls someone up on the phone and interviews them. Admittedly, it’s a unique way of getting a story, but his “Everybody Has a Story” segments on CBS’s The Early Show are being emulated on local newscasts and in newspapers across the country. Actually, Hartman got the idea for the segment from newspaper reporter David Johnson of Idaho’s Lewiston Morning Tribune.”

• The Rise of “Awesome”. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome.  If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”… How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good?”

• Celebrity Autobiography. “How does Vanna flip her panels?  What does Stallone have in his freezer?  Why did Burt and Loni topple from the upper tier of their wedding cake?  What makes the Jonas Brothers get along?  Find all this out and more in the new hit comedy “Celebrity Autobiography” where super star memoirs are acted out live on stage.  Audiences walk away from the show asking, “ Did they actually write that?”  Yes, we couldn’t make this stuff up!”

• How to Manage the Risks of Having Your Own Business. “Starting a business is risky. Horribly, terrifyingly risky. Nearly all new businesses fail — that’s the official statistic, right? Some say 4 out of 5, some say as many as 95%. Successful entrepreneurs have a different kind of DNA from the rest of us. Ice water runs through their veins. They thrive on risk. The more insane the odds, the better they like it. For those of us who have families, or who just don’t feel like living on ramen for the next four years, we’re probably better off keeping the day job. Do you believe any of those? Because I call B.S. on all of them.”

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